Is there no way to make this an argument at boot time?
Something like, `ksecerr=log+kill`
Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”
231–233 of 233 posts
Re: Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of self-driving cars maybe crashing from being hacked in some possible future we'll get kernel panics leading to crashes in all possible futures because we'll trigger car crashes on every false positive, because crashing in the face of the unknown is a seemingly acceptable solution to a security risk. Even if the software is running self-driving cars and crashing may mean crashing. In practice, false positive…
You would rather have a self driving car in an undefined state, rather than having it shut down? A random glitch could be just as bad as an exploit; if some chunk of memory gets overwritten and your car decides that the brick wall doesn't actually exist any more, I don't think whether it was an an exploit or not really matters. The occupants end up injured either way.
The undefined state might be in the GPU driver handling the heads-up display, or maybe in the sound subsystem. No need to shut down the system at the kernel level for that. Report the issue to the userland, so that it can decide whether to initiate a safe halt at the sidewalk or emergency lane.
After telling the kernel to shut down immediately you don't have that option any longer.
Re: Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because there is a workaround, applications just need to be updated. What actually happened: people reverted the patch. In the real world, you can't expect timely or even correct response from vendors you rely on. It sucks, but it's how it is.
Then after you get compromised in some way, you will start to look for better vendors.
Only if the cost*risk of a future compromise is > cost of replacing the product. This is rarely going to be the case for business critical software.