Re: [PATCH 000/190] Revertion of all of the umn.edu commits

Laurent Pinchart
2021-04-21T15:16:16Z

Hi Kangjie,

On Wed, Apr 21, 2021 at 09:44:52AM -0500, Kangjie Lu wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 21, 2021 at 9:32 AM Jiri Kosina wrote:
> > On Wed, 21 Apr 2021, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> > > > Commits from @umn.edu addresses have been found to be submitted in
> > > > "bad faith" to try to test the kernel community's ability to review
> > > > "known malicious" changes. The result of these submissions can be
> > > > found in a paper published at the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and
> > > > Privacy entitled, "Open Source Insecurity: Stealthily Introducing
> > > > Vulnerabilities via Hypocrite Commits" written by Qiushi Wu
> > > > (University of Minnesota) and Kangjie Lu (University of Minnesota).
> > >
> > > Sigh. As if this wouldn't be a problem everywhere.
> >
> > Right.
> >
> > > > Because of this, all submissions from this group must be reverted from
> > > > the kernel tree and will need to be re-reviewed again to determine if
> > > > they actually are a valid fix. Until that work is complete, remove this
> > > > change to ensure that no problems are being introduced into the
> > > > codebase.
> > > >
> > > > This patchset has the "easy" reverts, there are 68 remaining ones that
> > > > need to be manually reviewed. Some of them are not able to be reverted
> > > > as they already have been reverted, or fixed up with follow-on patches
> > > > as they were determined to be invalid. Proof that these submissions
> > > > were almost universally wrong.
> > > >
> > > > I will be working with some other kernel developers to determine if any
> > > > of these reverts were actually valid changes, were actually valid, and
> > > > if so, will resubmit them properly later. For now, it's better to be
> > > > safe.
> > > >
> > > > I'll take this through my tree, so no need for any maintainer to worry
> > > > about this, but they should be aware that future submissions from anyone
> > > > with a umn.edu address should be by default-rejected unless otherwise
> > > > determined to actually be a valid fix (i.e. they provide proof and you
> > > > can verify it, but really, why waste your time doing that extra work?)
> > > >
> > > > thanks,
> > > >
> > > > greg k-h
> > > >
> > > [ ... ]
> > > > Revert "hwmon: (lm80) fix a missing check of bus read in lm80 probe"
> > >
> > > I see
> > >
> > > 9aa3aa15f4c2 hwmon: (lm80) fix a missing check of bus read in lm80 probe
> > > c9c63915519b hwmon: (lm80) fix a missing check of the status of SMBus read
> > >
> > > The latter indeed introduced a problem which was later fixed with
> >
> > Therefore I'd like to ask Kangjie Lu (who is CCed here) to consider
> > revising his statement in the attempted public clarification:
> >
> > "The experiment did not introduce any bug or bug-introducing commit into
> > OSS."
> >
> > at [1] as it's clearly not true. Missing mutex unlock clearky is a bug
> > introduced by this experiment.
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I am so sorry for the concerns. I fully understand why the community is
> angry. Please allow me to have a very quick response, as Jiri requested. We
> will provide a detailed explanation later.
>
> These are two different projects. The one published at IEEE S&P 2021 has
> completely finished in November 2020. My student Aditya is working on a new
> project that is to find bugs introduced by bad patches. Please do not link
> these two projects together. I am sorry that his new patches are not
> correct either. He did not intentionally make the mistake.

Do you have a list of all known bad commits ? Not that we shouldn't
revert the other ones as well, but having a list of bad ones would be
useful when reviewing commits individually to see which ones may
actually be correct.

> > [1] https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~kjlu/

--
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart