Linux Security Summit North America 2023

In this session, Austin presents SecurityPerf. SecurityPerf is an open-source benchmarking framework for Linux security solutions. The session begins with a general overview of different benchmarking strategies, then shows how SecurityPerf provides insights into the performance impact of security solutions on real-world workloads. SecurityPerf’s benchmarks are all containerized, enabling them to run on any Linux infrastructure supporting containerization. By default, SecurityPerf provides benchmarks for loads run against Apache, MySQL, WordPress, MongoDB, and RabbitMQ services. SecurityPerf captures metrics including mean performance and standard deviation. After presenting SecurityPerf, Austin discusses results generated for three Linux security tools, the Linux Security Module Apparmor, the eBPF runtime security agent Falco, and the file scanner ClamAV. Austin uses the results to demonstrate where each solution exhibits performance overhead. Austin then discusses how these results can be leveraged to identify bottlenecks in security solutions and improve their performance. Austin concludes the presentation by explaining how community members can contribute to SecurityPerf.