Mitigating Hackers with Hardening on Linux - An Overview for Developers, Focus... Kaiwan Billimoria

Mitigating Hackers with Hardening on Linux - An Overview for Developers, Focus on BoF (Buffer Overflow) - Kaiwan Billimoria, kaiwanTECH
Our modern society is largely an info-driven one; embedded / IoT products based on our beloved Linux thrive. There is, however, a huge gap; the need for better security on end-products. Hackers currently have a field day! This session helps participants understand why and where software vulnerabilities exist, while programming and after; what (Linux) OS and app Hardening techniques one can deploy; what tools and methodologies help prevent and mitigate security issues. This session is heavily biased toward developers working on embedded Linux on resource-constrained systems using the 'C' programming language, for both application (user) and kernel-space (drivers, custom kernel features), and the security challenges faced by them. The tutorial consists of 3 parts: Part 1: Security and Hacking Intro Part 2: Deep dive into (some) software vulnerabilities, their root causes; CPU ABI basics geared to understanding the process / thread stack layout; the working of the BoF attack vector Part 3: Modern OS Hardening Countermeasures (on Linux), for both userspace apps and kernel (drivers, custom code). To make these discussions practical, a quick code-level demo of a simple BoF vuln on an ARM VM / hardware board will be performed (with the relevant code & docs provided on GitHub).