Learnings from kCTF VRP’s 42 Linux kernel exploits submissions (Google Online Security Blog)
Tamás Koczka, Security Engineer In 2020, we integrated kCTF into Google's Vulnerability Rewards Program (VRP) to support researchers evaluating the security of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and the underlying Linux kernel. As the Linux kernel is a key component not just for Google, but for the Internet, we started heavily investing in this area. We extended the VRP's scope and maximum reward in 2021 (to $50k), then again in February 2022 (to $91k), and finally in August 2022 (to $133k). In 2022, we also summarized our learnings to date in our cookbook, and introduced our experimental mitigations for the most common exploitation techniques. In this post, we'd like to share our learnings and statistics about the latest Linux kernel exploit submissions, how effective our mitigations are against them, what we…