Kernel modules and security – an overview

An ironic reality is that enormous efforts spent on improving user space security considerations have resulted in a pretty large payoff over recent years. A malicious user performing a viable Buffer Overflow (BoF) attack was well within the realms of possibility a couple of decades back, but today is really hard to do. Why? Because there are many layers of beefed-up security mechanisms to prevent many of these attack classes.

The irony is that kernel-space attacks have become increasingly common over the last few years! It has...