Linux kernel security work

(kroah.com)

33 points by chmaynard2 hours ago

2 comments

DebugDruid14 minutes ago
Sometimes I dream about a 100% secure OS. Maybe formal verification is the key, or Rust, I don’t know. But I would love to know that I can't be hacked.
JCattheATM1 hour ago
Their view that security bugs are just normal bugs remains very immature and damaging. It it somewhat mitigated by Linux having so many eyes on it and so many developers, but a lot of problems in the past could have bee avoided if they adopted the stance the rest of the industry recognizes as correct.
- tptacek1 hour ago
 From their perspective, on their project, with the constraints they operate under, bugs are just bugs. You're free to operationalize some other taxonomy of bugs in your organization; I certainly wouldn't run with "bugs are just bugs" in mine (security bugs are distinctive in that they're paired implicitly with adversaries).To complicate matters further, it's not as if you could rely on any more "sophisticated" taxonomy from the Linux kernel team, because they're not the originators of most Linux kernel security findings, and not all the actual originators are benevolent.
 - JCattheATM29 minutes ago
 > From their perspective, on their project, with the constraints they operate under, bugs are just bugs.That's a pretty poor justification. Their perspective is wrong, and their constraints don't prevent them from treating security bugs differently as they should.
 - ada000023 minutes ago
 > almost any bugfix at the level of an operating system kernel can be a “security issue” given the issues involved (memory leaks, denial of service, information leaks, etc.)On the level of the Linux kernel, this does seem convincing. There is no shared user space on Linux where you know how each component will react/recover in the face of unexpected kernel behaviour, and no SKUs targeting specific use cases in which e.g. a denial of service might be a worse issue than on desktop.I guess CVEs provide some of this classification, but they seem to cause drama amongst kernel people.
 - rwmj1 hour ago
 For sure, but you don't need to file CVEs for every regular bug.
 - Skunkleton29 minutes ago
 In the context of the kernel, it’s hard to say when that’s true. It’s very easy to fix some bug that resulted in a kernel crash without considering that it could possibly be part of some complex exploit chain. Basically any bug could be considered a security bug.
 - SSLy20 minutes ago
 plainly, crash = DoS = security issue = CVE.QED.
- akerl_23 minutes ago
 This feels almost too obvious to be worth saying, but “the rest of the industry” does not in fact have a uniform shared stance on this.
- firesteelrain51 minutes ago
 “A bug is a bug” is about communication and prioritization, not ignoring security. Greg’s post spells that out pretty clearly.
- beanjuiceII1 hour ago
 did you read it? because that's not their view at all