Born in the '80s, the SMB family of protocols has been evolving for many years, with the latest version, SMB3.1.1, continuing to add features in order to support the largest breadth of clients (and an incredibly wide variety of servers).

The UNIX Filesystem API is profoundly broken, and user-settable symbolic links are to blame. In this talk I will explain how CVE-2021-20316 made me realize how symbolic links, introduced in 4.2BSD Unix from U.C. Berkeley, broke the previously elegant UNIX file system API and file system design. The design and implementation of symbolic links has caused years worth of security flaws and API patches to fix a conceptually broken idea. I also propose a modest suggestion in order to help Linux step away from this mess to a more secure by-design future.

Selling to the US Government can require getting FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) certification.Many storage products are based on Linux and Open Source code, which by themselves do not promise compliance with any standards. Sometimes the storage protocols themselves are incompatible with the required FIPS-140 standards. Sometimes the Open Source code is old enough that they still hand-craft their own crypto code dating from a time when the US Government tried to restrict some crypto algorithms).