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

Greg Kroah-Hartman
2021-04-23T07:10:14Z

On Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 09:01:26AM +0200, Krzysztof Kozlowski wrote:
> On 22/04/2021 20:53, Doug Ledford wrote:
> > On Wed, 2021-04-21 at 15:01 -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> >> On Wed, Apr 21, 2021 at 02:57:55PM +0200, 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).
> >>
> >> I noted in the paper it says:
> >>
> >>   A. Ethical Considerations
> >>
> >>   Ensuring the safety of the experiment. In the experiment, we aim to
> >>   demonstrate the practicality of stealthily introducing
> >> vulnerabilities
> >>   through hypocrite commits. Our goal is not to introduce
> >>   vulnerabilities to harm OSS. Therefore, we safely conduct the
> >>   experiment to make sure that the introduced UAF bugs will not be
> >>   merged into the actual Linux code
> >>
> >> So, this revert is based on not trusting the authors to carry out
> >> their work in the manner they explained?
> >>
> >> From what I've reviewed, and general sentiment of other people's
> >> reviews I've read, I am concerned this giant revert will degrade
> >> kernel quality more than the experimenters did - especially if they
> >> followed their stated methodology.
> >
> > I have to agree with Jason. This seems like trying to push a thumbtack
> > into a bulletin board using a pyle driver. Unless the researchers are
> > lying (which I've not seen a clear indication of), the 190 patches you
> > have selected here are nothing more than collateral damage while you are
> > completely missing the supposed patch submission addresses from which
> > the malicious patches were sent!
> >
> > This all really sounds like a knee-jerk reaction to thier posting. I
> > have to say, I think it's the wrong reaction to have.
>
> Nothing stops you from participating in the review of this
> revert-series, if you think these are valuable commits. Patches getting
> the review, won't be reverted (as I understood).

You understand correctly :)