Re: [stable] Linux 2.6.25.10

Linus Torvalds
2008-07-15T20:43:56Z

On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, pageexec@freemail.hu wrote:
>
> i understand and i think noone expects that. in fact, i know how much
> expertise and time it takes to determine that. but what happens when
> you do figure out the security relevance of a bug during bug submission

The issue is that I think it's then _misleading_ to mark that kind of
commit specially, when I actually believe that it's in the minority.

If people think that they are safer for only applying (or upgrading to)
certain patches that are marked as being security-specific, they are
missing all the ones that weren't marked as such. Making them even
_believe_ that the magic security marking is meaningful is simply a lie.
It's not going to be.

So why would I add some marking that I most emphatically do not believe in
myself, and think is just mostly security theater?

I generally do not remove peoples changelog entries, although I _will_
do even that if I think it's just too much of an actual exploit
description (of course - the patch itself can make the exploit fairly
clear). So you'll find CVE entries etc in the logs if you look.

But I do hope that anybody who looks for them is _aware_ that it's just a
small minority of possible problems.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that security bugs are _common_, but
especially some local DoS thing for a specific driver or filesystem or
whatever can be a big security problem for _somebody_.

Linus