The LPE Landscape

• Where kernel bugs live: core syscalls, device drivers, filesystems, networking, and newer subsystems (eBPF, io_uring).
• Why they persist: the Linux kernel is roughly 30+ million lines of C, with thousands of drivers of varying quality and a huge, complex attack surface.
• Third-party drivers are a classic weak spot: vendor code, less reviewed than mainline, often reachable from unprivileged users via a device file.
• Impact tiers: local DoS (crash / panic) < info leak (defeat KASLR) < arbitrary read/write < full code execution and root.