The Washington Post published an article today which describes the ongoing tension between the security community and Linux kernel developers. This has been roundly denounced as FUD, with Rob Graham going so far as to claim that nobody ever attacks the kernel Unfortunately he's entirely and demonstrably wrong, it's not FUD and the state of security in the kernel is currently far short of where it should be.An example. Recent versions of Android use SELinux to confine applications. Even if you have full control over an application running on Android, the SELinux rules make it very difficult to do anything especially user-hostile. Hacking Team, the GPL-violating Italian company who sells surveillance software to human rights abusers, found that this impeded their ability to drop their spyware onto targets' devices. So they took advantage of the fact that many Android devices shipped a kernel with a flawed copy_from_user() implementation that allowed them to copy arbitrary userspace data over arbitrary kernel code, thus allowing them to disable SELinux.If we could trust userspace applications, we wouldn't need SELinux. But we assume that userspace code may be buggy, misconfigured or actively hostile, and we use technologies such as SELinux or AppArmor to restrict its behaviour. There's simply too much userspace code for us to guarantee that it's all correct, so we do our best to prevent it from doing harm anyway.This is significantly less true in the kernel. The model up until now has largely been "Fix security bugs as we find them", an approach that fails on two levels:1) Once we find them and fix them, there's still a window between the fixed version being available and it actually being deployed2) The forces of good may not be the first ones to find themThis reactive approach is fine for a world where it's possible to push out software updates without having to perform extensive testing first, a world where the only people hunting for interesting kernel vulnerabilities are nice people. This isn't that world, and this approach isn't fine.Just as features like SELinux allow us to reduce the harm that can occur if a new userspace vulnerability is found, we can add features to the kernel that make it more difficult (or impossible) for attackers to turn a kernel bug into an exploitable vulnerability. The number of people using Linux systems is increasing every day, and many of these users depend on the security of these systems in critical ways. It's vital that we do what we can to avoid their trust being misplaced.Many useful mitigation features already exist in the Grsecurity patchset, but a combination of technical disagreements around certain features, personality conflicts and an apparent lack of enthusiasm on the side of upstream kernel developers has resulted in almost none of it landing in the kernels that most people use. Kees Cook has proposed a new project to start making a more concerted effort to migrate components of Grsecurity to upstream. If you rely on the kernel being a secure component, either because you ship a product based on it or because you use it yourself, you should probably be doing what you can to support this.Microsoft received entirely justifiable criticism for the terrible state of security on their platform. They responded by introducing cutting-edge security features across the OS, including the kernel. Accusing anyone who says we need to do the same of spreading FUD is risking free software being sidelined in favour of proprietary software providing more real-world security. That doesn't seem like a good outcome.