To be more blunt: if you’re paying for a product, the vendor owes you whatever things they committed to. If you’re a Redhat customer and your agreed SLA with Redhat for this kind of security fix was passed by, go be mad at Redhat. (I don’t think Redhat is bad here, they’re just the vendor most known for a commercial offering from the lists here. I would say the same thing about Ubuntu Pro)
Otherwise, it’s on the end user. Distro volunteers don’t owe you anything. Kernel devs don’t owe you anything.
I don’t care about what would be the most effective way of doing things. I care about what folks involved actually owe to each other, and distro volunteers don’t owe users any kind of active chasing of remediation due to the user’s threat model.
The idea of making some kind of streamlined process that solves what you didn’t like about this vulnerability’s remediation is that it ignores basically all the complexity. Like “what about distros that don’t abide by embargoes” or “what distros count as ones that matter” or “what about all the vulns that aren’t in Linux, they’re in software that’s packaged across many operating systems”.
Agree on this so hard. Why does everyone expect instant patches and SLA-like infrastructure from unpaid volunteers?
If you want that, buy a commercial distro of linux, or use Windows. That's a huge part of Microsoft's value proposition to enterprise - they pay people to stay on top of security patches for you. Same with RedHat and others.
Expecting anything of unpaid volunteers is unreasonable.
> THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
Right, you’re saying “system is working as designed”, and I’m agreeing, but I’m saying “the system as designed kind of sucks, how can we make it better”?
I disagree that it sucks. It leverages a ton of people putting in their time and resources, and relies on system operators being active participants.
This vulnerability is, for some threat models, a really big deal. A security group found the vulnerability. They disclosed it. It was patched.
Folks here have gotten all kinds of bent out of shape that the groups involved didnt do things in the way each internet commenter would have liked. But this is the system working.
> This vulnerability is, for some threat models, a really big deal.
This vulnerability is, for other threat models, a death sentence.
> A security group found the vulnerability. They disclosed it. It was patched.
It was patched only after some people who should have been notified well in advance happened to notice something was up. That is NOT HOW IT'S SUPPOSED TO WORK.
For as long as the unpatched window remains open, skids will mess around and break things. Organized crime teams will use it for some really nasty hacking/ransomware/exfil/extortion/whatever. I guarantee you, this vuln is powerful and widespread enough that intel orgs will use it to kill targets, if they haven't already been using it for years. And if they have, we can just bank on them pulling out all the stops to take advantage of the remaining time for wreaking havoc. Make a project out of it and see if you can guess some of the future headlines.
Certain folks might not care much because they are citizens of one or more of those orgs' nations, so those targets are welcome to die in their opinion. That's fine. You do you, I'll do me, we'll all just go on doing our thing. But it's all fun and games until the wrong target gets hit and now there's a pact between the Germans and the Austrians being invoked and a few dozen million Europeans die. Or a geopolitical hotspot flares up and overnight 20% of the global petroleum supply chain grinds to a halt. Use your imagination. This vuln is a digital magic wand that is trivially usable to cast Avada Kedavra and somebody neglected to tell 99.99% of the Good Guys about it.
How is this different from any other day? Because now we've got a world-changing vuln out in the wild with no distro mitigation on day 1, and who the hell knows how many unscrupulous actors poised to take advantage of it before the fun and games stops. There will be no adults in the room when the miscreants decide to deploy while they still can.
Is this vuln going to start the next world war? Probably not. I don't expect it to and I hope and pray it doesn't. But leaving a vuln like this undisclosed to the very people whose job it is to protect us all is playing with fire. Not matches; more like a 10-grams-less-than-critical mass of plutonium.
sam is right to be pissed and he's doing a very good job of hiding it, because he knows that his users are at the mercy of TPTB in the Linux kernel world. Somebody's head needs to roll for this, and I don't mean some dude the CIA wants to hax0r because he's next on the list.
> This vuln is a digital magic wand that is trivially usable to cast Avada Kedavra and somebody neglected to tell 99.99% of the Good Guys about it.
A Linux LPE is a nothingburger unless you’re relying on the Linux kernel to enforce internal security boundaries, which would simply be foolish.
The PoC exploit code in python (3.10+) fits comfortably in 1k bytes. An unminified version that works for even older versions of python is just a hair under a 1500 byte packet payload, modulo headers for your preferred method of delivery. I can only guess how much it could be shrunk down to only the shellcode.
Now, y'all tell me, since I'm not a web guy. How hard is it going to be to tweak this lovely little pathogen into some kind of browser exploit? It just needs to be combined with a sandbox escape to work on current versions, right? Difficult but quite worth investing the time and effort to develop if that's your line of business. If that happens, every at-risk Tails user is going to have to stay offline for a while, unless they want to play the drone lottery.
Or how about chaining it with any of the as-yet unpatched bugs in gawd-only-knows how many web services out there that have poor input sanitization code? That bug now graduates from a DoS crash causer to a root grab. Good luck stopping it with your fancy AI Behavioral Analysis security tools. They better be fast. The sploit is going to do its work in two packets, maybe three. Fun times.
Lucky for us systems monkeys, it's not like anybody is spending billions of dollars to develop vuln finding AI tools right at this very second. So there shouldn't be many unpatched web services holes.
Oh, wait.
Of course, as the grey hats can already tell you, the really delicious part of this thing is how it's going to become the LPE tool of first resort for any APT that's already inside ur base killin ur doodz.
Nothingburger? This nothingburger is going to root a million OS instances before we know what hit us.
You're freaking out about the exploit being written in Python and occupying only a small number of bytes. Are you the LLM that wrote Xint's terrible landing page? If so, I have questions.
Oh come on, you know what I'm saying. It's small when written in python, which means any skid can spew it into a server he's got a shell on and get root in 2 seconds. He doesn't need to hope there's already a compiler installed, nor does he need to download some big tool. Just:
And I'm sure it can be refined into something much more likable to the spooky types, if they haven't already done it.Again, Linux LPE via either vulns or misconfigured permissions / binaries is common.
People who run servers that give out shell access to uses or randos already needed to contend with this.
Added later: you may find https://gtfobins.org/ fascinating or horrifying.
I think you’re reading a ton into this vulnerability that is not there.
I wish you were right. But I've been testing every system I can and so far I'm yet to find one that isn't vulnerable.
25 seconds if I type it out by hand instead of copypasta. Sigh.How many people do you let have local code execution on your systems? This is a local privilege escalation. They are relatively common. They are a big deal if you run a system that lets multiple untrusted users commingle code on a shared operating system.
Otherwise it’s not.
Start a distro with your preferred upstream tracking policy.
Is that the only option here? It’s certainly being framed as such.
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Fwiw, I'm completely with you on this. The folks you're communicating with seem utterly miserable, and don't seem to be communicating in good faith.
Not sure what the solution could/should be, but surely there could be a better, easier mechanism for kernel to advise all distro maintainers who care, and for those distro maintainers to subscribe in some way. Whether any distro maintainers do so (let alone do something about the vuln notifications) would be entirely up to them. There could also be some easier way for end users to see what the distros' policies on this are, such that they can take that into account when selecting a distro.
It seems odd to call me utterly miserable and then suggest I’m not communicating in good faith.
We don’t have to agree, but the site rules are pretty clear that swipes like that aren’t ok.
That kind of distro maintainers and kernel devs communication path already exists: the linux-distros@ mailing list. But since anybody can read it, posting “hey everybody, this is a security patch” has basically the same effect as the security researcher posting, in terms of disclosing the vuln to bad actors.
Given that anybody can make a Linux distro, and Linux distros aren’t generally either capable or interested in background checking their teams or policing their individual security practice, it doesn’t seem possible to have a communication channel that distros can sign up for that lacks this problem.
The person I was defending NEVER suggested that extra burden should be put on anyone. Just that there ought to be some system (even if imperfect)to make it easy for everyone (or, if not everyone, at least a select group - eg the main distros). But you and others kept saying that they were trying to put burden on various parties. That's the poor faith.
How do you get a system without somebody (or multiple somebodies) being responsible for it?
Just as a purely intellectual exercise, what changes about this if we leave aside ideas of "owe," "deserve ," and "earn?"
There's not really an enforcement mechanism in FOSS like there is in capitalism world, it just comes down to what we want our part of the world to look like. So I think we'd think more clearly if we leave aside the ideas like "who owes who what." I think it's fun to imagine what sort of motivations and incentives there are if we put away the money ones.
"leave aside ideas of "owe," "deserve ," and "earn?""
Nonsensical string of words with no meaning.
If you want something that someone else isn't giving you, you have the option to try to do it yourself, or try to compel someone else to give you what you want somehow. Feel free to idk pay someone to track the kernel list and 4000 others and send you heads-ups? Try to pass a law to make people do what you want since you don't care about words like "owe"?
> If you want something that someone else isn't giving you, you have the option to try to do it yourself, or try to compel someone else to give you what you want somehow.
Yes, exactly, the opposite of paying, since when you pay someone something they owe you whatever you paid for.
If we leave aside owe, deserve, and earn, we can start discussing things like what we want our kernel ecosystem to look like, how we can make it safer, etc, without being burdened by these concepts.
It's a simple intellectual exercise, that's all. If you're having a strong reaction to it, imo that'd make it even more fun for you to participate.
But there was no intellectual excercise. Only a complaint with no proposal.
You want someone to do something for you for some other reason than that they owe you.
They already are doing something for you that they don't owe you. They are writing software that you benefit from. You just want them (or somebody) to do something else that they don't owe you.
They aren't, because they don't owe you and it's not something they want to do for fun, and so since the problem is they don't owe you, you wish to set aside words like "owe".
Well sure. Looks like you found the problem and the solution alright. Why didn't anyone else think of that?
I don't feel like I'm complaining, I feel like I'm asking how else someone would frame it without leaning on the concepts mentioned. What changes about the dynamic then?
But what does that mean? "owe" is just shorthand for the concept of obligation. For someone to do something, they need a reason to do it. It doesn't have to be a transaction but there does need to be some reason.
If no one is doing a task you want done because they aren't obligated to, then you seek some other reason besides obligation. Ok, what then?
Do you imagine say a dating website where people compete to look attractive by getting points by doing the best job at finding the most bugs and patches and reporting them to the most downstream consumers the fastest?
> For someone to do something, they need a reason to do it. It doesn't have to be a transaction but there does need to be some reason.
Exactly! That's what I'm interested in exploring.
> If no one is doing a task you want done because they aren't obligated to, then you seek some other reason besides obligation. Ok, what then?
That's what I love exploring. Action with no obligation. Have you any examples of that in your life? Nobody obligates me to do the long walks I enjoy where I stick a 360 camera on my head and then upload the footage to Mapillary and other open platforms, I just like to do it, and I want to find other things that I'm motivated to do without obligation, and I'm fascinated by things people do for "no reason." Understanding human motivation is really important to me for some reason.
As to "what then," yes what then? If I run a cashless commune, how do we make sure the toilets get cleaned? That's the whole question, and I love exploring it. If you'd like to experience it yourself, you could always try attending a regional Burn for a bit of a micro version of it, people doing things just for the sake of it.
I'm sorry, I don't quite understand what you mean by the dating app thing.