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CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq
21–30 of 256 posts
Re: CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq
#22Maybe this is the kick in the ass Debian needs to upgrade the embarrassingly ancient dnsmasq in "stable" because while I can't think of any new features, the latest versions contain many non-CVE bug fixes. But I doubt it, they will lazily backport these patches to create some frankenstein one-off version and be done with it. Before anyone says "tHaT's wHaT sTaBlE iS fOr": they have literally shipped straight-up broke…
They're not going to put a newer version in stable. The way stable gets newer versions of things is that you get the newer version into testing and then every two years testing becomes stable and stable becomes oldstable, at which point the newer version from testing becomes the version in stable. The thing to complain about is if the version in testing is ancient.
No, that's exactly the thing to complain about.
That whole model dates to before automated testing was even really a thing, and no one knew how to do QA; your QA was all the people willing to run your code and report bugs, and that took time. Not to mention, you think the C of today is bad? Have you looked at old C?
And the disadvantage is that backporting is manual, resource intensive, and prone to error - and the projects that are the most heavily invested in that model are also the projects that are investing the least in writing tests and automated test infrastructure - because engineering time is a finite resource.
On top of that, the backport model heavily discourages the kinds of refactorings and architectural cleanups that would address bugs systemically and encourage a whack-a-mole approach - because in the backport model, people want fixes they can backport. And then things just get worse and worse.
We'd all be a lot better off if certain projects took some of the enthusiasm with which they throw outrageous engineering time at backports, and spent at least some of that on automated testing and converting to Rust.
Re: CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq
#23if machine-learning can find all these holes why can't machine-learning write a product from scratch that is flawless?
Have you ever met a security engineer? I’ve never met one who was also a good engineer (not saying they don’t exist, I just haven’t met one). Do they find vulnerabilities? Sure. Could they write the tools they use to find vulnerabilities, most probably not.
Re: CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not going to put a newer version in stable. The way stable gets newer versions of things is that you get the newer version into testing and then every two years testing becomes stable and stable becomes oldstable, at which point the newer version from testing becomes the version in stable. The thing to complain about is if the version in testing is ancient.
Looks like the version in stable is 2.91, which was released within a couple months of trixie. It's not 'ancient' by any stretch. FWIW the fixes referenced here are already fixed in trixie: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/d...
Yeah was about to comment, parent says "if it is ancient", it is not. So the root comment is nothing burger. Stable has 1 release cycle old, and depending on how things play out, testing may have 2.93 or later anyways.
Re: CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq
#25if machine-learning can find all these holes why can't machine-learning write a product from scratch that is flawless?
LLMs certainly make it more feasible to rewrite a product in a memory-safe language, eliminating a whole class of bugs.
Flawless software is hard for an LLM to write, because all the programs they have been trained on are flawed as well.
As a fun exercise, you could give a coding agent a hunk of non-trivial software (such as the Linux kernel, or postgresql, or whatever), and tell it over and over again: find a flaw in this, fix it. I'm pretty sure it won't ever tell you "now it's perfect" (and do this reproducibly).
Re: CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq
#26if machine-learning can find all these holes why can't machine-learning write a product from scratch that is flawless?
Because the problem is asymmetric: the attacker only needs to find one hole at one time. The defender has to be flawless forever.
Re: CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq
#27> The tsunami of AI-generated bug reports shows no signs of stopping, so it is likely that this process will have to be repeated again soon.
Welcome to the new world order.
Re: CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not going to put a newer version in stable. The way stable gets newer versions of things is that you get the newer version into testing and then every two years testing becomes stable and stable becomes oldstable, at which point the newer version from testing becomes the version in stable. The thing to complain about is if the version in testing is ancient.
No, that's exactly the thing to complain about. That whole model dates to before automated testing was even really a thing, and no one knew how to do QA; your QA was all the people willing to run your code and report bugs, and that took time. Not to mention, you think the C of today is bad? Have you looked at old C? And the disadvantage is that backporting is manual, resource intensive, and prone to error - and the p…
If you want that, you don't want Debian. Other people do.
Some people will even run Debian on the desktop. I would never, but some people get real upset when anything changes.
Debian does regularly bring newer versions of software: they release about every two years. If you want the latest and greatest Debian experience, upgrade Debian on week one.
From your description, you seem to want Arch but made by Debian?
Re: CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's exactly the thing to complain about. That whole model dates to before automated testing was even really a thing, and no one knew how to do QA; your QA was all the people willing to run your code and report bugs, and that took time. Not to mention, you think the C of today is bad? Have you looked at old C? And the disadvantage is that backporting is manual, resource intensive, and prone to error - and the p…
If you want that, you don't want Debian. Other people do. Some people will even run Debian on the desktop. I would never, but some people get real upset when anything changes. Debian does regularly bring newer versions of software: they release about every two years. If you want the latest and greatest Debian experience, upgrade Debian on week one. From your description, you seem to want Arch but made by Debian?
Well, my workstation runs Debian sid, and all the newer stuff runs NixOS...
But that does nothing for people who write and support code Debian wants to ship - packaging code badly can create a real mess for upstream.
Re: CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not going to put a newer version in stable. The way stable gets newer versions of things is that you get the newer version into testing and then every two years testing becomes stable and stable becomes oldstable, at which point the newer version from testing becomes the version in stable. The thing to complain about is if the version in testing is ancient.
No, that's exactly the thing to complain about. That whole model dates to before automated testing was even really a thing, and no one knew how to do QA; your QA was all the people willing to run your code and report bugs, and that took time. Not to mention, you think the C of today is bad? Have you looked at old C? And the disadvantage is that backporting is manual, resource intensive, and prone to error - and the p…
> That whole model dates to before automated testing was even really a thing, and no one knew how to do QA; your QA was all the people willing to run your code and report bugs, and that took time.
That's not what it's about.
What it's about is, newer versions change things. A newer version of OpenSSH disables GSSAPI by default when an older version had it enabled. You don't want that as an automatic update because it will break in production for anyone who is actually using it. So instead the change goes into the testing release and the user discovers that in their test environment before rolling out the new release into production.
> On top of that, the backport model heavily discourages the kinds of refactorings and architectural cleanups that would address bugs systemically and encourage a whack-a-mole approach - because in the backport model, people want fixes they can backport.
They're not alternatives to each other. The stable release gets the backported patch, the next release gets the refactor.
But that's also why you want the stable release. The refactor is a larger change, so if it breaks something you want to find it in test rather than production.