Dailydave mailing list archives

Re: Security people are leaches. [sic]


From: Aaron <apconole () yahoo com>
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 10:41:09 -0700 (PDT)

except we don't live in a black and white world. 'security bug' or heck,
just 'bug' is not a binary property, there're many shades of grey in what
exactly the bug accomplishes. it's clearly not enough to state that 'this
commit fixes something but i did not want to bother to understand what',
users of said commits need more information than that. fortunately not all
developers share linus' mindset although their efforts are sometimes in
vain when what he commits intentionally omits security relevant information.

Excuse me, but no one commits fixes without understanding what they've fixed.
If someone fixes a segfault/oops they might not have done the investigation to
determine whether or not something is theoretically or practically usable for something
nefarious, but they understand that there was a null pointer dereference, or an invalid
lock condition and they removed that problem.

The 'shades of grey' only exist to security people. To no one else is it important
that a bug disclose information, allow invalid root access, or escalate privileges.

So the point still stands, why burden the average kernel developer/debugger to do
security research work for the security researcher?



      
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