[volta83]

> We send the emails to the Linux communityand seek their feedback.

That's not really what they did.

They sent the patches, the patches where either merged or rejected.

And they never let anybody knew that they had introduced security vulnerabilities on the kernel on purpose until they got caught and people started reverting all the patches from their university and banned the whole university.

[duncaen]

This is not what happened according to them:

https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~kjlu/papers/clarifications-hc....

> (4). Once any maintainer of the community responds to the email, indicating “looks good”, we immediately point out the introduced bug and request them to not go ahead to apply the patch. At the same time, we point out the correct fixing of the bug and provide our proper patch. In all the three cases, maintainers explicitly acknowledged and confirmed to not move forward with the incorrect patches. This way, we ensure that the incorrect patches will not be adopted or committed into the Git tree of Linux.

[tecleandor]

It'd be great if they pointed to those "please don't merge" messages on the mailing list or anywhere.

Seems like there are some patches already on stable trees [1], so they're either lying, or they didn't care if those "don't merge" messages made anybody react to them.

1 - https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/CADVatmNgU7t-Co84tSS6VW=3N...

[treesknees]

The paper doesn't cite specific commits used. It's possible that any of the commits in stable are actually good commits and not part of the experiment. I support the ban/revert, I'm just pointing out there's a 3rd option you didn't touch on.

[coriny]

Patches with built-in bugs made it to stable: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YIAta3cRl8mk%2FRkH@unreal/.

[bmcahren]

Here's the commit specifically identified by Leon Romanovsky as having a "built-in bug"

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/8e949363f017

[rigden33]

That commit is from Aditya Pakki who I don't believe is affiliated with the paper in question, whose only authors are Qiushi Wu, and Kangjie Lu.

[corty]

Also, they are talking of three cases. However, the list of patches to be reverted by gregkh is far longer than three, more than a hundred. Most of the first batch look sufficiently similar that I would guess all of them are part of this "research". So the difference in numbers alone points to them most probably lying.

[finnthehuman]

I was more ambivalent about their "research" until I read that "clarification." It's weaselly bullshit.

>> The work taints the relationship between academia and industry

> We are very sorry to hear this concern. This is really not what we expected, and we strongly believe it is caused by misunderstandings

Yeah, misunderstandings by the university that anyone, ever, in any line of endeavor would be happy to be purposely fucked with as long as the perpetrator eventually claims it's for a good cause. In this case the cause isn't even good, they're proving the jaw-droppingly obvious.

[PeterisP]

The first step of an apology is admitting the misdeed. Here they are explicitly not acknowledging that what they did was wrong, they are still asserting that this was a misunderstanding.

[rualca]

Even their choice of wording ("We are very sorry to hear this concern.") is the blend of word fuckery that conveys the idea they care nothing about what they did or why it negatively affected others.

[HackOfAllTrades]

>We are very sorry to hear this concern.

..."Because if we're lucky tomorrow, we won't have to deal with questions like yours ever again." --Firesign Theater, "I Think We're All Bozos on the Bus"

[dwild]

> they're proving the jaw-droppingly obvious.

Yet we do nothing about it? I wouldn't call that jaw-droppingly obvious, if anything, without this, I'm pretty sure that anyone would argue that it would be caught way before making it way into stable.

[rurp]

I've literally never come across an open source project that was thought to have a bullet proof review process or had a lack of people making criticisms.

What they do almost universally lack is enough people making positive contributions (in time, money, or both).

This "research" falls squarely into the former category and burns resources that could have been spent on the latter.

[Apofis]

This is zero percent different from a bad actor and hopefully criminal. I think a lot of maintainers work for large corporations like Microsoft, Oracle, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc... I think these guys really stepped in it.

[incrudible]

> And they never let anybody knew that they had introduced security vulnerabilities on the kernel on purpose...

Yes, that's the whole point! The real malicious actors aren't going to notify anyone that they're injecting vulnerabilities either. They may be plants at reputable companies, and they'll make it look like an "honest mistake".

Had this not been caught, it would've exposed a major flaw in the process.

> ...until they got caught and people started reverting all the patches from their university and banned the whole university.

Either these patches are valid fixes, in which case they should remain, or they are intentional vulnerabilities, in which case they should've already been reviewed and rejected.

Reverting and reviewing them "at a later date" just makes me question the process. If they haven't been reviewed properly yet, it's better to do it now instead of messing around with reverts.

[simiones]

This reminds me of that story about Go Daddy sending everyone "training phishing emails" announcing that they had received a company bonus - with the explanation that this is ok because it is a realistic pretext that real phishing may use.

While true, it's simply not acceptable to abuse trust in this way. It causes real emotional harm to real humans, and while it also may produce some benefits, those do not outweigh the harms. Just because malicious actors don't care about the harms shouldn't mean that ethical people shouldn't either.

[incrudible]

This isn't some employer-employee trust relationship. The whole point of the test is that you can't trust a patch just because it's from some university or some major company.

[simiones]

The vast majority of patches are not malicious. Sending a malicious patch (one that is known to introduce a vulnerability) is a malicious action. Sending a buggy patch that creates a vulnerability by accident is not a malicious action.

Given the completely unavoidable limitations of the review and bug testing process, a maintainer has to react very differently when they have determined that a patch is malicious - all previous patches past from that same source (person or even organization) have to be either re-reviewed at a much higher standard or reverted indiscriminately; and any future patches have to be rejected outright.

This puts a heavy burden on a maintainer, so intentionally creating this type of burden is a malicious action regardless of intent. Especially given that the intent was useless in the first place - everyone knows that patches can introduce vulnerabilities, either maliciously or by accident.

[incrudible]

> The vast majority of patches are not malicious.

The vast majority of drunk drivers never kill anyone.

> Sending a malicious patch (one that is known to introduce a vulnerability) is a malicious action.

I disagree that it's malicious in this context, but that's irrelevant really. If the patch gets through, then that proves one of the most critical pieces of software could relatively easily be infiltrated by a malicious actor, which means the review process is broken. That's what we're trying to figure out here, and there's no better way to do it than replicate the same conditions under which such patches would ordinarily be reviewed.

> Especially given that the intent was useless in the first place - everyone knows that patches can introduce vulnerabilities, either maliciously or by accident.

Yes, everyone knows that patches can introduce vulnerabilities if they are not found. We want to know whether they are found! If they are not found, we need to figure out how they slipped by and how to prevent that from happening in the future.

[c22]

Since humanity still hasn't fixed the problem of drunk drivers I guess I'll start driving drunk on the weekends to illustrate the flaws of the system.

[simiones]

> If the patch gets through, then that proves one of the most critical pieces of software could relatively easily be infiltrated by a malicious actor, which means the review process is broken.

That is a complete misunderstanding of the Linux dev process. No one expects the first reviewer of a patch (the person that the researchers were experimenting on) to catch any bug. The dev process has many safeguards - several reviewers, testing, static analysis tools, security research, distribution testing, beta testers, early adopters - that are expected to catch bugs in the kernel at various stages.

Trying to deceive early reviewers into accepting malicious patches for research purposes is both useless research and hurtful to the developers.

[bluesnowmonkey]

Open source runs on trust, of both individuals and institutions. There’s no alternative. Processes like code review can supplement but not replace it.

[nomel]

So my question is, what is a kernel? Is it a security project? Should security products rely on trust, or assume malicuous intent?

[simiones]

Open source products rely on trust. There is no way to build a trust-less open source product. Of course, the old mantra of trust, but verify is very important as well.

But the linux kernel is NOT a security product - it is a kernel. It can be used in entirely disconnected devices that couldn't care less about security, as well as in highly secure infrastructure that powers the world. The ultimate responsibility of delivering a secure product based on Linux lies with the people delivering a secure product based on the kernel. The kernel is a essentially library, not a product. If someone is assuming they can build a secure product by trusting Linux to be "secure" than they are simply wrong, and no amount of change in the Linux dev process will fix their assumption.

Of course, you want the kernel to be as secure as possible, but you also want many other things from the kernel as well (it should be featureful, it should be backwards compatible with userspace, it should run on as many architectures as needed, it should be fast and efficient, it should be easy to read and maintain etc).

[powersnail]

> Yes, that's the whole point!

Well, in real life, you can't go punch someone in the face to teach them a "point". If you do so, you'll get punished.

> Reverting and reviewing them "at a later date" just makes me question the process.

I don't think anybody realistically thought that the kernel review process is rock solid against malicious anyway. What exactly does the paper expose?

[darkarmani]

> Yes, that's the whole point! The real malicious actors aren't going to notify anyone that they're injecting vulnerabilities either. They may be plants at reputable companies, and they'll make it look like an "honest mistake".

This just turns the researchers into black hats. They are just making it look like "a research paper."