Security Retrospective of the last year
Not just Meltdown and Spectre
Schedule

Presented by:

Marcus Meissner

from SUSE

Marcus was born in 1973. He studied computer science in Erlangen, Germany and finished with Diploma. He worked for Caldera from 1999 until the closure of Caldera Linux Business in 2002. He is working for SUSE since 2002, and in the security team since 2004. He has lead the team until begin of 2013 and is now the security project manager. He also is part of the openSUSE Maintenance team and works on a lot of openSUSE packages. In his spare time he is a gphoto (digital camera access library) and Wine developer.

Last year was a quite busy year on the security front, various big issues happened, so its good to tell what security has done there and is doing for openSUSE and SUSE in general here.

The talk will give a brief overview of how the SUSE Security Team works and operates. We will look at the reactive work including statistics, and also look at proactive secure development lifecycle activities.

I will also highlight some of the big security issues we faced over the last year.

  • Stack Clash from mid of 2017.

Overview of the problem, what we do for mitigations, and our long way for compiler mitigations.

  • Meltdown and Spectre

As we hoped never to have a StackClash like issue again, CPU sidechannel issues surfaced which needed kernel mitigations begin of January.

I will give an overview over what these issues are, and how we mitigated them or are still mitigating them.

I will also talk about one of my projects done in the last year:

  • Full PIE enablement for the distribution and its long road to Factory.

Date:
2018 May 26 - 11:00
Duration:
45 min
Room:
107 (Small)
Conference:
openSUSE Conference 2018
Language:
Track:
Open Source
Difficulty:
Easy

Happening at the same time:

  1. Booths and Retro Gaming in the Main Lobby
    2. Start Time:
    2018 May 26 10:00

    Room:
    Main Lobby (open space)

  2. Container and VM Building OBS Workshop
    3. Start Time:
    2018 May 26 10:30

    Room:
    349 (Workshop)

  3. Making the LSM available to containers
    4. Start Time:
    2018 May 26 10:45

    Room:
    155 (Medium)

  4. The GNU Health : Free Software technology improving Public Healthcare around the world
    5. Start Time:
    2018 May 26 10:45

    Room:
    105 (Main)

  5. Mycroft: A.I. in the desktop
    6. Start Time:
    2018 May 26 11:30

    Room:
    155 (Medium)

  6. Meet Uyuni: A complete opensource solution to keep multiple GNU/Linux systems configured and up-to-date
    7. Start Time:
    2018 May 26 11:30

    Room:
    105 (Main)