Re: Linux kernel CVEs not mentioned on oss-security

[Greg KH <greg () kroah com>]

On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 02:51:49PM +0200, Solar Designer wrote:
> Besides, Greg focuses on the problem that some ignore the stable kernels
> or the "curated and tested stream of fixes" that could be seen in there,
> whereas another concern mentioned earlier in the thread is that the
> stream is also incomplete because some security fixes are not marked as
> such and not CC'ed to stable.  So that's two problems mentioned in the
> thread, but vendor-sec was not / linux-distros is not related to either.

For that second issue, I've not ever really run into any "known security
fix" not being cc:ed to stable.  Do you have any known examples where I
can go poke the maintainers to do better?

We have plenty of the normal "bugfix was merged that a few years later
turned out to be a 'security' issue, but no one realized it at the time"
changes that get merged.  And to help combat that, we are doing more and
more "smart mining"[1] of the kernel commits to try to catch patches
that match those types of fixes and get them merged into the stable
kernels.

You can see the initial results of this work with the huge increase in
patches being merged to the 4.9 and 4.4 stable kernels vs. any older
stable kernel trees in the past.

thanks,

greg k-h

[1] yes, we know people have been doing this for years, but they almost
    never notify upstream about this for various reasons.