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

Guenter Roeck
2021-04-21T13:57:06Z

On 4/21/21 5:57 AM, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> I have been meaning to do this for a while, but recent events have
> finally forced me to do so.
>
> 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.

> 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

07bd14ccc304 hwmon: (lm80) Fix missing unlock on error in set_fan_div()

I guess that was part of the experiment. I don't see a problem with the
patch that is being reverted, but it is not extremely valuable either,
so I don't mind the revert. It is not valuable enough to re-apply it later
either.

FWIW, I didn't see the problem with the second patch even when re-reviewing
it, which makes me suspect that they introduced missing-unlock problems on
purpose. It is important to keep that in mind when re-reviewing the patches.
Also, it may be part of the pattern that they introduced one or more valid
patches followed by a malicious one into the same subsystem on purpose.

Guenter