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Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”

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Re: Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”

#191

Post by eugeneionesco »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #147
lima wrote: post #3

Background: the "kernel self protection project" (KSSP) recently upstreamed the Grsecurity/PAX reference counting implementation which prevents a certain class of security bugs from being exploited. Grsecurity is a security hardening patchset for Linux that makes deliberate trade-offs in favor of security, sacrificing availability if necessary. This, aside from the political issue, is the main reasons why it's hard t…

>If the large companies who use Linux really want to improve kernel security, they need to work with Grsecurity and not against them. It's beyond me how this isn't happening already. It's more that Grsecurity is working against everyone else. They want to pretend the GPL works in a way that it doesn't so that they can sell their patches. Then they make threats to people who say "that's not how the GPL works" and dist…

You're spreading FUD.

I suggest you educate yourself on the reasons grsecurity patches are no longer public anymore.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”

#192

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

eugeneionesco wrote: post #191
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If the large companies who use Linux really want to improve kernel security, they need to work with Grsecurity and not against them. It's beyond me how this isn't happening already. It's more that Grsecurity is working against everyone else. They want to pretend the GPL works in a way that it doesn't so that they can sell their patches. Then they make threats to people who say "that's not how the GPL works" and dist…

You're spreading FUD. I suggest you educate yourself on the reasons grsecurity patches are no longer public anymore.

You're welcome to present an argument for your case.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”

#193

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

dwild wrote: post #179
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the kind of thinking Linus is talking about. In 3, I lost my work. Possibly very important work. To most people, being a part of stuxnet, while undesirable, is preferable to losing their work. And you neglected a scenario 4: nobody is attempting to compromise my machine, but a buggy bit of USB code just crashed my system and took all my work with it.

You never learned at school to save what you are working on often? It's crazy, you are either too old to have required computer for school work or too young to have not lived through years of constant bluescreens. Both 3 and 4 are mitigated by you saving your document often... it's not so bad, considering it can happen whatever you do. Nowadays, Word is made to keep saving your change for that reason... They learned…

Again, passing the buck. You know what I do instead of use your software that crashes all the goddamn time? I use someone else's software that doesn't.

Yes, of course we should save often, have decent backups, etc. But nobody is perfect and shit happens, and it'd be nice if the software you use didn't intentionally make it worse.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”

#194

Post by sctb »

Slavius wrote: post #130
mythz wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Keep running your app although integrity corruption within the application happened is putting user data at risk. If user data is continually backed up to a remote site it's not going to be at risk from a local bug is it? Bugs exist in all software, Users are going to be be more visibly frustrated from their Apps frequently crashing then the extremely unlikely scenario where a detected bug corrupts their "3 days lo…

You clearly have limited view on application bugs. Let me elaborate a bit on bugs causing application dissatisfaction and UX frustration without crashing much, much worse than a simple error message along the lines: "OS has terminated application X because it has performed an illegal operation." Data corruption - reading or writing corrupted data - files cannot be read, saved files get corrupted, API calls from/to ex…

> You clearly have limited view on application bugs.

Please leave out the uncivil swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”

#195

Post by mrsernine »

titzer wrote: post #178
mrsernine wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you would probably rather your programs crash than give away private information Crashing on a security issue is a good thing for every kind of user. Crashing on a latent bug that COULD be exploited (maybe not possible at all) is a totally not desirable situation. The problem here is that hardening methods lack the ability to make that distinction.

> Crashing on a latent bug that COULD be exploited (maybe not possible at all) is a totally not desirable situation. How do you square this with the reality that "keep on truckin" is generally the path from bugs to security exploits, and has been shown to be over and over in the wild?

Bugs will happen, that's a natural law of computer science, if you keep on trucking over them you will be delivering buggy software that is likely to cause problems. Even if you chase them down and correct them all, your software is still going to have bugs, that's a fact of life.

Should code containing bugs be allowed to run? If the answer is no we must ask ourselves how much software we have today that is completely bug free (that will be 0%).

I still think these proactive approaches are good to disclose possible exploits, but killing processes just because they might be exploitable is a very long shot.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”

#196

Post by ksk »

corpMaverick wrote: post #167
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #9

do you want to know why your (random big company) does not do software development that well. when was the last time you saw an email like that from the chairman of the board to all employees? with Please in it. and long winded explanations? companies need to chnage

This is what I was thinking when I was reading. Linus has been thinking carefully about this for a long time. He has taken this piece of software and he has nurtured it for years. He has protected it. He made sure that it is coherent and maintainable. He has put forward as set of guiding principles. I haven't seen this in the companies that I have worked for, middle and upper management don't have any insight over th…

I 100% agree with Linus here, buuuut Linus doesn't have to make money for his company, and isn't personally responsible for the salaries of people in the company. He doesn't have to sit in meetings and explain why sales are down 10% this quarter, or keep assuring investors that their money is safe. Those upper-management people do solve problems, its just that they're solving problems in an environment that isn't based on logic, and is fundamentally unfair.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”

#197

Post by mcguire »

lima wrote: post #3

Background: the "kernel self protection project" (KSSP) recently upstreamed the Grsecurity/PAX reference counting implementation which prevents a certain class of security bugs from being exploited. Grsecurity is a security hardening patchset for Linux that makes deliberate trade-offs in favor of security, sacrificing availability if necessary. This, aside from the political issue, is the main reasons why it's hard t…

"Grsecurity will rather terminate userland programs or, in some rare cases, panic the kernel if it finds itself in an undefined state. This is exactly what you want if you care about security, but it's not a trade-off everyone is happy with (including Linus)."

If you really cared about security, you'd leave the box unplugged.

"I remember many bugs that were uncovered by PAX_REFCOUNT and yes, occasionally panicked the kernel where a vanilla kernel would run just fine. They usually found and fixed those within hours."

Speaking as someone who has done middling large scale production administration, that's not reassuring.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”

#198

Post by fb03 »

The first thing I did when starting to read Linus' answer was to Ctrl-F for badwords. I am really happy he's blossomed from that teenage angst colorful name-calling era.

Way to go, man!

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”

#199

Post by mcguire »

amelius wrote: post #8
lima wrote: post #3

Background: the "kernel self protection project" (KSSP) recently upstreamed the Grsecurity/PAX reference counting implementation which prevents a certain class of security bugs from being exploited. Grsecurity is a security hardening patchset for Linux that makes deliberate trade-offs in favor of security, sacrificing availability if necessary. This, aside from the political issue, is the main reasons why it's hard t…

> Grsecurity will rather terminate userland programs or, in some rare cases, panic the kernel if it finds itself in an undefined state. This is exactly what you want if you care about security, but it's not a trade-off everyone is happy with (including Linus). I'd also like my kernel to halt whenever an assertion does not hold, for the sake of keeping my sanity; not just for security. Why would you not want this?

Depends. How attached are you to getting work done today?

I too would like to live in a world where sanity preserving assertions have rational consequences. But that world is not this world, and pretending it is won't help you get there.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”

#200

Post by mcguire »

Slavius wrote: post #42
payne92 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason people drive with their “check engine” light on: It’s frequently better to have a working system (i.e. “I’m late for work”), than to chase an indicator that may not represent a real problem (an actual security intrusion).

I can't think of single useful piece of software nowdays that is exposed to public and can't run in active-active load balanced or clustered scenario. If your kernel/system/userland-app misbehaves it simply needs to be shut down, reported and examined. It might have been some random memory block the last time your app made an buffer overflow, but it could as well be the stack pointer next time...

Never had a single problem take down all of your instances at once, eh?
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