Linux server admins may get the ability to turn off a vulnerable function in the OS kernel until a patch for a zero-day vulnerability is ready, if a proposal from a kernel developer and maintainer is accepted by the open source community.
The idea of a kill switch for privileged operators has been suggested by Sasha Levin, a distinguished engineer at Nvidia and co-maintainer of the long-term support and stable Linux kernel trees, as a mitigation when a security hole is discovered.
As he pointed out in a recent post, when a vulnerability is found, “fleets stay exposed until a patched kernel is built, distributed and rebooted into. For many such issues, the simplest mitigation is to stop call...