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

Krzysztof Kozlowski
2021-04-23T07:01:35Z

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).

Best regards,
Krzysztof