Open Source Summit Europe 2024

More and more Operators automate deployment of cloud native applications in Kubernetes. Operators often automate the whole process of setting up and maintaining applications, including setting up the necessary workload resources, such as Deployments, StatefulSets and more. This poses a challenge for us Operator developers. Oftentimes, users of our Operator have specific requirements for the deployed workloads, restricting them to specific nodes, requiring additional configuration, added sidecar containers and many more. This talk shows how using kustomize in our Operator, we can simplify our own Operators while still allowing users the full range of customization. This even also allows for quick iteration during feature development.

The first flexible-array transformation we implemented in the kernel, as part of the Kernel Self-Protection Project, took place back in March 2019. At the time, our work on preventing integer overflows during memory allocations led us to discover an 8-year-old bug. Addressing this bug not only resolved a longstanding issue but also initiated the work of flexible-array transformations across the whole kernel tree. This marked the beginning of a challenging yet rewarding journey to add bounds-checking on trailing arrays in the Linux kernel. Five years have passed since then, and we've come a long way. We have now new Clang and GCC hardening compiler options and attributes, that significantly improve the security of the Linux kernel, particularly in the spatial-safety area. We have new hardening helpers that make traditional methods less prone to error. In general, we have new and safer ways of doing things, which usually require a learning curve, even for seasoned kernel developers. In this talk, we will walk through the most recent challenges and history of our quest to improve spatial safety in the Linux kernel, and with that, get rid of out-of-bounds bugs once and for all.