Security was absent from the Red Hat Summit keynote stage; which isn’t to say that Red Hat doesn’t take security seriously
the first press panel of the first day of the event was a retrospective look at the Meltdown and Spectre processor vulnerabilities. John Masters, the Chief Arm Architect (and self-acclaimed processor nerd) at Red Hat took the stage alongside Chris Robinson from the product security team who was one of the ‘incident handlers’ during the Meltdown and Spectre response. Both were very open and honest about the entire affair, especially when it came to matters such as getting the balance right between mitigating the vulnerability risks without hitting performance too hard. Given that the whole point of the speculative execution process that was found to be vulnerable is to improve overall performance.
Security at the Red Hat Summit wasn’t just restricted to this look back at how the company responded to one threat. Indeed, the security strand was pretty much woven throughout the event if you looked closer. IT Security Thing certainly looked closer…
