Cook: Security things in Linux v4.20

Kees Cook summarizes the security-related improvements in the 4.20 kernel. "Enabling CONFIG_GCC_PLUGIN_STACKLEAK=y means almost all uninitialized variable flaws go away, with only a very minor performance hit (it appears to be under 1% for most workloads). It’s still possible that, within a single syscall, a later buggy function call could use 'uninitialized' bytes from the stack from an earlier function. Fixing this will need compiler support for pre-initialization (this is under development already for Clang, for example), but that may have larger performance implications."

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