When a laptop is asleep, its memory is not unreadable. The right tooling can attach to the computer's memory bus and read out its contents, and cold-boot attacks can theoretically read values from memory for a short time after the computer loses power. That is really an unavoidable fact about the hardware, but some users would still like to ensure that, even if this happens, their long-term encryption keys, such as the key for full-disk encryption, remain unreadable. In June 2026, Ingo Blechschmidt discovered that Linux kernel versions after 6.9 (released in May 2024) were not erasing disk-encryption keys when a laptop was put to sleep, even when configured to do so. He quickly identified a potential fix, which has been merged, but it was not a comprehensive solution.

The null block driver (null_blk) is a small driver that is mostly useful for benchmarking block-layer implementations. It accepts all requests and marks them complete as quickly as possible, doing as little work as possible. In June 2026, Andreas Hindborg shared a patch set implementing the same functionality in Rust, in order to show that a simple block driver is now possible to write using the kernel's Rust APIs and to enable comparisons between the C and Rust implementations. A minimal version of the "rnull" driver is already present in the mainline kernel, but Hindborg's patch set brings it up to feature parity with the C version.

Practical quantum computers have been ten years away for the last several decades. Now, however, it's beginning to look as though they will be possible in just a few years. Recent research with obfuscated results demonstrated much lower memory requirements to factor ECDSA keys on a quantum computer, with work by other researchers in the open more than halving memory use compared to the state of the art in 2023. At the same time, computer manufacturers are boasting quantum processors that retain viable superpositions over longer periods. Given how slowly software updates filter out to stable systems, it's worth looking at what configuration changes and protocol updates are needed to be safe from quantum computers now.

Ihor Solodrai and Shung-Hsi Yu wrapped up the BPF track at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit with a pair of sessions related to testing. Solodrai spoke about what has changed for BPF's continuous-integration (CI) testing. Yu spoke about what may be needed to test BPF updates in stable kernels more thoroughly. The BPF subsystem's CI tests are in a good place, they said; even so, Solodrai and Yu have a handful of possible avenues toward enabling better test coverage in the future.

Christopher Domas has published a proof of concept with a description showing how to use AMD memory controllers' bank swizzle mode to bypass memory protection and read or write arbitrary data, including CPU microcode definitions and memory belonging to the platform security processor. Among other things, this allows code running at the kernel level to directly manipulate the meaning of processor instructions, potentially bypassing other security measures such as memory encryption and virtual machine isolation.

This is not, strictly, unexpected behavior: it is documented in AMD's manual (on page 113 of that PDF). But the fact that it can be used to access arbitrary memory and thereby rewrite supposedly immutable parts of the computer's firmware without crashing the host machine seems like an unintentional side-effect of the design. Fortunately, since enabling bank swizzle mode requires kernel-level privileges, the vulnerability is not an immediate problem for most software. Still, it seems likely that this technique will end up being used for nefarious purposes eventually.

Storage code has to cope with hardware that fails in inconvenient ways, but coaxing a healthy disk into producing those failures on demand, for testing, is usually not possible. The kernel provides several ways to inject block-layer I/O errors, but none of those can select the operation to fail, pick the status code to return, or target a disk directly without employing a stacked device on top. Use of a stacked device means the test runs against the mapper device, not the disk it was meant to exercise. A patch series from Christoph Hellwig adds a configurable error-injection interface that does all three things that the current error-injection code lacks, controlled by a per-disk debugfs file.

BPF offers useful safety guarantees, but Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi wants BPF programs to be even safer. At the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, he led a session (slides) discussing the possibility of adding domain-specific invariants to BPF programs. It was not a discussion intended to lead to the implementation of any particular kernel feature, but rather an overview of why additional formal verification might be needed, and how it could work with the existing BPF ecosystem.

Jordan Rife's work involves writing BPF programs for Cilium that interface with Kubernetes networking. As part of that work, he wants to enable BPF programs with appropriate permissions to iterate through the sockets of a different network namespace. He led a session about the idea at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit where the BPF developers in attendance were quick to suggest a number of related alternatives.

StepSecurity is reporting the emergence of a new worm affecting npm packages. The design of the worm is nothing new, but the rapidity with which it is exploiting captured npm packager credentials is noteworthy.

TL;DR: A self-propagating worm, which we are calling ChainDrop, is spreading rapidly through the npm ecosystem. So far 435 packages and more than 1,550 compromised versions have been flagged, starting with keyv@6.0.0. If you are using any of the packages listed below, assume your environment is compromised. We are still investigating the full scope; check back on this post for updates.

Song Liu believes that the way that programmers assemble complex BPF programs will be changing rapidly in the future. At a session of the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, he shared his thoughts on what that change could look like, though he did not have any concrete proposals for what, if anything, the BPF maintainers should do. He anticipates an ecosystem of Rust BPF packages developing, which is significant because BPF does not really have a package manager at the moment.

BPF programs use BPF type format (BTF) debugging information in order to determine how to interact with functions in the kernel. Specifically, tracing a kernel function involves finding its address in the kernel's BTF section — but that doesn't work for functions that have been inlined, and therefore don't have a single, specific address. Alan Maguire wants to add information about inlined functions to BTF in order to allow them to be traced, and led a session on that topic at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit.

The gccrs project, which is creating a Rust frontend for the GCC compiler, has spent the first half of 2026 focusing on compiling the Linux kernel. By testing the compiler against the kernel crates, the development team has made significant progress toward generating correct code for other Rust programs. As detailed in the project's weekly and monthly reports, this effort has uncovered and resolved problems in areas such as attribute handling (described in the report for February), name resolution, and resource management (both detailed in the May report). Currently, the compiler can only handle simple standalone programs, but that situation could change rapidly in the coming months.

Daniel Borkmann led a session at the 2026 Linux Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about the progress that has been made with netkit, the subsystem that allows virtual machines (VMs) running on Linux to perform networking efficiently. When that did not fill the full time, he went on to discuss his idea for using BPF to live-patch user-space applications. While netkit is making progress, and can now support zero-copy receipt of packets into a VM in a network namespace, the idea of using BPF for patching user-space programs remains entirely speculative.

Tracepoints in the kernel are useful for a variety of purposes: debugging, active monitoring, and performance measurements, among other things. Previously, any given BPF program could only be attached to a single tracepoint. Jiri Olsa has been working to change that, and led a discussion about his progress at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. That work has since been merged, and can be expected as part of the 7.2 kernel.

Since 2020, BPF programs have been able to act as Linux security modules (LSMs). Several projects, including systemd, have been working to use that capability to provide more security to users. Christian Brauner spoke at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about some of the limitations of using BPF in this way, and the changes he would like to see for systemd's use. In particular, he would like a way to make sure that BPF programs cannot be removed or have their private data tampered with.

Tetragon, the BPF-based security monitoring tool, uses BPF to monitor different aspects of a running kernel and enforce user-specified policies. It sends its data to a user-space process, which forwards the data to a central monitoring service elsewhere in the network, however. This presents a point of vulnerability: if an attacker can kill Tetragon's user-space agent, it won't be able to properly report on the situation. Song Liu, Mahé Tardy, and Liam Wiseheart spoke about their work removing the need for the user-space agent at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit.

Cisco has some unusual challenges when it comes to deploying security patches across the company's many devices running custom kernels. John Fastabend spoke about his work preventing exploits with BPF at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. The technique could substantially reduce the time necessary to respond to kernel vulnerabilities, but it will not be fully effective unless more hooks are added to the kernel.

Debian has announced the final normal update for Debian 12 ("bookworm"). Long-term-support updates will continue until 2028. As may be expected from a stable version, the update is mostly limited to security fixes. Still, it may be time for Debian users to look into upgrading to a more recent version. Conveniently, Debian 13 ("trixie") also received an update this weekend, with many of the same security fixes.