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

Jiri Kosina
2021-04-21T14:32:53Z

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.

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

Thanks,

--
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs