KFENCE is not a security mitigation mechanism (due to sampling), but has the performance characteristics of unintrusive hardening techniques. When used at scale, however, it improves overall security by allowing kernel developers to detect heap memory-safety bugs cheaply.
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected] Cc: Matthieu Baerts <[email protected]> Cc: Jakub Kicinski <[email protected]> Signed-off-by: Marco Elver <[email protected]> --- kernel/configs/hardening.config | 3 +++ 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+) diff --git a/kernel/configs/hardening.config b/kernel/configs/hardening.config index 95a400f042b1..79c865bfb116 100644 --- a/kernel/configs/hardening.config +++ b/kernel/configs/hardening.config @@ -46,6 +46,9 @@ CONFIG_UBSAN_BOUNDS=y # CONFIG_UBSAN_ALIGNMENT CONFIG_UBSAN_SANITIZE_ALL=y +# Sampling-based heap out-of-bounds and use-after-free detection. +CONFIG_KFENCE=y + # Linked list integrity checking. CONFIG_LIST_HARDENED=y -- 2.43.0.687.g38aa6559b0-goog
