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“They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

lore.kernel.org

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Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#761
post #469
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

A lot of people are talking about the ethical aspects, but could you talk about the security implications of this attack? From a different thread: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/CADVatmNgU7t-Co84tSS6VW=3N... > A lot of these have already reached the stable trees. Apologies in advance if my questions are off the mark, but what does this mean in practice? 1. If UNM hadn't brought any attention to these, would they h…

[deleted]

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#762
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.

Wow. That is a flagrant violation of research ethics by everyone involved. UMN needs to halt anything even close to human subjects research until they get their IRB back under control, who knows what else is going on on campus that has not received prior approval. Utter disaster.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#763

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…

Well part of the experiment is to see how deliberate malicious commits are handled. Banning is the result. They got what they wanted. Play stupid game. Win stupid pri[z]e.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#764
It seems we hit another level of "progressive" stupidity and that has to be the most "woke" IT univ if they allow such BS to happen. Of course they deserve the ban. To be that stupid, self-centered and despise someone else's work to this extent, then play a victim - you need to be brainwashed by some university professor. Not to mention they confuse being friendly to beginners with tolerance for brainless parasites.

They exploited authority of educational institution and everyone SANE who is studying there to intentionally break someone's else work for their own profit.

Not sure what's severity of this attack but if these "patches" got into critical parts of kernel like NFS they should not only be expelled but prosecuted. Becase what's next? Another bunch of MORONS will launch attacks on medical equipement to see if they're able to kill someone and then cry if they fail?

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#765
post #469
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

A lot of people are talking about the ethical aspects, but could you talk about the security implications of this attack? From a different thread: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/CADVatmNgU7t-Co84tSS6VW=3N... > A lot of these have already reached the stable trees. Apologies in advance if my questions are off the mark, but what does this mean in practice? 1. If UNM hadn't brought any attention to these, would they h…

I wonder about this me too.

To me, seems to indicate that nation state supported evil hacker org (maybe posing as an individual) could place their own exploits in the kernel. Let's say they contribute 99.9% useful code, solve real problems, build trust over some years, and only rarely write an evil hard to notice exploit bug. And then, everyone thinks that obviously it was just an ordinary bug.

Maybe they can pose as 10 different people, in case some of them gets banned.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#768

Here's a clarification from the Researchers over at UMN[1]. They claim that none of the Bogus patches were merged to the Stable code line : >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 t…

The response makes the researchers seem clueless, arrogant, or both - are they really surprised that kernel maintainers would get pissed off at someone deliberately wasting their time? From the post: * Does this project waste certain efforts of maintainers? Unfortunately, yes. We would like to sincerely apologize to the maintainers involved in the corresponding patch review process; this work indeed wasted their prec…

Time of these idiots is probably worth nothing so why should they care :D

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#769
post #393

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?

Learn how to torture? Maybe. Learn real knowledge? No. Most of those info are not just sick but also impractical.

The goal of military is to protect or conquer. The goal of science is to find the truth, and the goal of the engineering is to offer solutions. Any of the true leaders in either fields knows there're more efficient means/systems to get those goals, even in ww2 era.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#770
post #763

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…

Well part of the experiment is to see how deliberate malicious commits are handled. Banning is the result. They got what they wanted. Play stupid game. Win stupid pri[z]e.

Well said.
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