Live data from Hacker News

“They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

lore.kernel.org

71–80 of 1001 posts

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#71
post #40

[flagged]

This is unjustified xenophobia. And besides, if they were really trying to get bugs into the Linux kernel to further some nefarious goal, why would they publish a paper on it? Simplest explanation is that they just wanted the publication, not to blame it on CCP or the researchers' nationality.

As I said, the research is the goal. Acknowledging China's past behaviour, and applying it to potential present actions, is not xenophobia.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#73

I guess someone had to do this unethical experiment, but otoh, what is the value here? There's a high chance someone would later find these "intentional bugs" , it's how open source works anyway. They just proved that OSS is not military-grade , but nobody thought so anyway

> but nobody thought so anyway

A lot of people claim that there's a lot of eyes on the code and thus introducing vulnerabilities is unlikely. This research clearly has bruised some egos bad.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#75

I don't quite understand the outrage. Quite sure most HN readers were doing/involved in similar experiments one way or another. Isn't A/B testing an experiment on consumers (people) without their consent?

There is a sea of difference between A/B testing your own property, and maliciously introducing a bug on a critical piece of software that's running on billions of devices.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#76
post #2

I don't think there have been any recent comments from anyone at U.Mn. So, back when the original research (happened last year) the following clarification was offered by Qiushi Wu and Kangjie Lu which atleast paints their research in somewhat better light: https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~kjlu/papers/clarifications-hc.... That said the current incident seems to have gone beyond the limits of that one and is a new incid…

From their explanation: (3). We send the incorrect minor patches to the Linux community through email to seek their feedback. (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…

> indicating “looks good”

I wonder how many zero days have been included already, for example by nation state actors...

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#77

Researcher(s) shows that it's relatively not hard to introduce bugs in kernel HN: let's hate researcher(s) instead of process Wow. Assume good faith, I guess?

Wasting the time of random open source maintainers who have not consented to your experiment to try to get your paper published is highly unethical; I don't see why this is a bad faith interpretation.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#80

Out of curiosity, what would be an actually good way to poke at the pipeline like this? Just ask if they'd OK a patch w/o actually submitting it? A survey?

Probably ask the maintainers to consent and add some blinding so that the patches look otherwise legitimate.
Post reply on HN