“They introduce kernel bugs on purpose” • Hacker News Board

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#381

Post by motohagiography » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

arkh wrote: post #342

> I will not be sending any more patches due to the attitude that is not only unwelcome but also intimidating to newbies and non experts. Maybe not being nice is part of the immune system of open source.

On the other thread, I suggested this was an attack on critical infrastructure using a university as cover and that this was a criminal/counter-intellgence matter, and then asked whether any of these bug submitters also suggested the project culture was too aggressive and created an unsafe environment, to reduce scrutiny on their backdoors.

Talk about predictive power in a hypothesis.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#382

Post by kevincox » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #171

ENOTTY wrote: post #22

Later down thread from Greg K-H: > Because of this, I will now have to ban all future contributions from your University. Understandable from gkh, but I feel sorry for any unrelated research happening at University of Minnesota. EDIT: Searching through the source code[1] reveals contributions to the kernel from umn.edu emails in the form of an AppleTalk driver and support for the kernel on PowerPC architectures. In t…

Seems like a bit of a strong response. Universities are large places with lots of professors and people with different ideas, opinions, views, and they don't work in concert, quite the opposite. They're not some corporation with some unified goal or incentives. I like that. That's what makes universities interesting to me. I don't like the standard here of of penalizing or lumping everyone there together, regardless…

This was approved by the university ethics board so if trust of the university is by part because the actions of the students need to pass an ethics bar it makes sense to remove that trust until the ethics committee has shown that they have improved.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#383

Post by walrus01 » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #290

Linux maintainers should log a complaint with the University's ethics board. You can't just experiment on people without consent.

I have a theory that while the university's ethics board may have people on it who are familiar with the myriad of issues surrounding, for instance, biomedical research, they have nobody on it with even the most cursory knowledge of open source software development. And nobody who has even the faintest idea of how critically important the Linux kernel is to global infrastructure.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#384

Post by angry_octet » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

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.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#385

Post by aritmo » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #360

I don't like this university ban approach. Universities are places with lots of different students, professors, and different people with different ideas, and inevitably people who make bad choices. Universities don't often act with a single purpose or intent. That's what makes them interesting. Prone to failure and bad ideas, but also new ideas that you can't do at corporate HQ because you've got a CEO breathing dow…

A university-wide ban helps in converting the issue into an internal issue of that university. The university officials will have to figure out what went wrong and rectify.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#386

Post by CTDOCodebases » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

Fair. You are either part of the solution, part of the problem or just part of the landscape.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#387

Post by goatinaboat » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

rubyn00bie wrote: post #321

This is supremely fucked up and I’d say is borderline criminal. It’s really lucky asshole researchers like this haven’t caused a bug that cost billions of dollars, or killed someone, because eventually shit like this will... and holy shit will “it was just research” do nothing to save them.

It’s just a shame there is no mechanism in the license to withdraw permission for this so-called university to use Linux at all

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#388

Post by woodruffw » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

random5634 wrote: post #284

How does something like this get through IRB - I always felt IRB was over the top - and then they approve something like this? UMN looks pretty shoddy - the response from the researcher saying these were automated by a tool looks like a potential lie.

> the response from the researcher saying these were automated by a tool looks like a potential lie.

To be clear, this is unethical research.

But I read the paper, and these patches were probably automatically generated by a tool (or perhaps guided by a tool, and filled in concretely by a human): their analyses boil down to a very simple LLVM pass that just checks for pointer dereferences and inserts calls to functions that are identified as performing frees/deallocations before those dereferences. Page 9 and onwards of the paper[1] explains it in reasonable detail.

[1]: https://github.com/QiushiWu/QiushiWu.github.io/blob/main/pap...

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#389

Post by pas » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

rubyn00bie wrote: post #321

This is supremely fucked up and I’d say is borderline criminal. It’s really lucky asshole researchers like this haven’t caused a bug that cost billions of dollars, or killed someone, because eventually shit like this will... and holy shit will “it was just research” do nothing to save them.

How come there's no ethical review for research that interacts with people? (I mean it's there in medicine and psychology, and probably for many economics experiments too.)

edit: oh, it seems they got an exemption, because it's software research - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26890084 :|

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#390

Post by krastanov » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 2:58 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #360

I don't like this university ban approach. Universities are places with lots of different students, professors, and different people with different ideas, and inevitably people who make bad choices. Universities don't often act with a single purpose or intent. That's what makes them interesting. Prone to failure and bad ideas, but also new ideas that you can't do at corporate HQ because you've got a CEO breathing dow…

I am writing this as someone who is very much "career academic". I am all on board with banning the whole university (and reconsidering the ban once the university shows they have some ethics guidelines in place). This research work should not have passed ethics review. On the other hand, it sounds preposterous that we even would need formal ethics review for CS research... But this "research" really embodies the whole "this is why we can not have nice things" attitude.