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“They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

lore.kernel.org

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Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#741

Post by probably_wrong »

oraged wrote: post #517
ltfish wrote: post #413

Some clarifications since they are unclear in the original report. - Aditya Pakki (the author who sent the new round of seemingly bogus patches) is not involved in the S&P 2021 research. This means Aditya is likely to have nothing to do with the prior round of patching attempts that led to the S&P 2021 paper. - According to the authors' clarification [1], the S&P 2021 paper did not introduce any bugs into Linux kerne…

This is Aditya Pakki's webiste: https://adityapakki.github.io/ In this "About" page: https://adityapakki.github.io/about/ he claims "Hi there! My name is Aditya and I’m a second year Ph.D student in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota. My research interests are in the areas of computer security, operating systems, and machine learning. I’m fortunate to be advised by Prof. Kangjie Lu." so he…

I would encourage you not to post people's contact information publicly, specially in a thread as volatile as this one. Writing "He claims in his personal website" would bring the point across fine.

This being the internet, I'm sure the guy is getting plenty of hate mail as it is. No need to make it worse.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#742

Post by smsm42 »

alpaca128 wrote: post #440
beshrkayali wrote: post #335

This seems like a pretty scummy way to do "research". I mean I understand that people in academia are becoming increasingly disconnected from the real world, but wow this is low. It's not that they're doing this, I'm sure they're not the first to think of this (for research or malicious reasons), but having the gall to brag about it is a new low.

> having the gall to brag about it is a new low Even worse: They bragged about it, then sent a new wave of buggy patches to see if the "test subjects" fall for it once again, and then tried to push the blame on the kernel maintainers for being "intimidating to newbies". This is thinly veiled and potentially dangerous bullying.

This looks a very cynical attempt to leverage PC language to manipulate people. Basically a social engineering attack. They surely will try to present it as pentest, but IMHO it should be treated as an attack.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#743

Post by klodolph »

kwdc wrote: post #626

It would be fascinating to see the ethics committee exemption. I sense there was none. Or is this kind of experiment deemed fair game? Red vs blue team kind of thing? Penetration testing. But if it was me in this situation, I'd ban them for ethics violation as well. Acting like a Evil doer means you might get caught... and punished. I found the email about cease and desist particularly bad behavior. If that student w…

The ethics committee issued a post-hoc exemption after paper was published.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#744

Post by Rantenki »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #684

Researcher sends bogus papers to journal/conference, gets them reviewed and approved, uses that to point how ridiculous the review process of the journal is => GREAT JOB, PEER REVIEW SUCKS! Researcher sends bogus patches to bazaar-style project, gets them reviewed and approved, uses that to point how ridiculous the review process of the project is => DON'T DO THAT! BAD RESEARCHER, BAD!

OK? If somebody else does something ethically dubious, does that make all ethically dubious behaviours acceptable somehow? How does a totally separate instance of ethical misconduct impact this situation?

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#746

Post by dang »

This thread is paginated, so to see the rest of the comments you need to click More at the bottom of the page, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670&p=3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670&p=4

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670&p=5

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670&p=6

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670&p=7

(Posts like this will go away once we turn off pagination. It's a workaround for performance, which we're working on fixing.)

Also, https://www.neowin.net/news/linux-bans-university-of-minneso... gives a bit of an overview. (It was posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26889677, but we've merged that thread hither.)

Edit: related ongoing thread: UMN CS&E Statement on Linux Kernel Research - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26895510 - April 2021 (205 comments and counting)

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#748

Post by kevingadd »

gruez wrote: post #393
angry_octet wrote: post #384

Research without ethics is research without value. Unbelievable that this could have passed ethics review, so I'd bet it was never reviewed. Big black eye for University of Minnesota. Imagine if you are another doctoral student is CS/EE and this tool has ruined your ability to participate in Linux.

> Research without ethics is research without value. didn't we learn a lot from nazi/japanese experiments from ww2?

Experiments producing lots of data doesn't necessarily mean they were useful. If the experiment was run improperly the data is untrustworthy, and if the experiment was designed to achieve things that aren't useful they may not have controlled for the right variables.

And ultimately, we know what their priorities were and what kind of worldview they were operating under, so the odds are bad that any given experiment they ran would have been rigorous enough to produce results that could be reproduced in other studies and applied elsewhere. I'm not personally aware of any major breakthroughs that would have been impossible without the "aid" of eugenicist war criminals, though it's possible there's some major example I'm missing.

We certainly did bring over lots of German scientists to work on nukes and rockets, so your question is not entirely off-base - but I suspect almost everyone involved in those choices would argue that rocketry research isn't unethical.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#749

Post by inglor »

gregkh wrote: post #267
rzwitserloot wrote: post #181

The professor gets exactly what they want here, no? "We experimented on the linux kernel team to see what would happen. Our non-double-blind test of 1 FOSS maintenance group has produced the following result: We get banned and our entire university gets dragged through the muck 100% of the time". That'll be a fun paper to write, no doubt. Additional context: * One of the committers of these faulty patches, Aditya Pak…

Thanks for the support. I also now have submitted a patch series that reverts the majority of all of their contributions so that we can go and properly review them at a later point in time: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20210421130105.1226686-1-gregkh...

Just wanted to say thanks for your work!

As an OSS maintainer (Node.js and a bunch of popular JS libs with millions of weekly downloads) - I feel how _tempting_ it is to trust people and assume good faith. Often since people took the time to contribute you want to be "on their side" and help them "make it".

Identifying and then standing up to bad-faith actors is extremely important and thankless work. Especially ones that apparently seem to think it's fine to experiment on humans without consent.

So thanks. Keep it up.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#750

Post by dang »

atleta wrote: post #583

It's already being discussed on HN [1] but for some reason it's down to the 3rd page despite having ~1200 upvotes at the moment and ~600 comments, including from Greg KH. (And the submission is only 5 hours old.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670

Sorry, we got that wrong. Fixed now.

Edit: turns out it was just that there were two different threads on the frontpage about this story and a moderator downweighted the earlier one. That's standard moderation. Usually we merge the threads (and I've since done so) but I'm the only mod who currently does that and I wasn't online yet.

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