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Comment by xbar | Hacker News Reader

This is not responsible research. This is similar to initiating fluid mechanics experiments on the wings of a Lufthansa A320 in flight to Frankfurt with a load of Austrians.

There are a lot of people to feel bad for, but none is at the University of Minnesota. Think of the Austrians.

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No, it's totally okay to feel sorry for good, conscientious researchers and students at the University of Minnesota who have been working on the kernel in good faith. It's sad that the actions of irresponsible researchers and associated review boards affect people who had nothing to do with professor Lu's research.

It's not wrong for the kernel community to decide to blanket ban contributions from the university. It obviously makes sense to ban contributions from institutions which are known to send intentionally buggy commits disguised as fixes. That doesn't mean you can't feel bad for the innocent students and professors.

> good, conscientious researchers and students at the University of Minnesota who have been working on the kernel in good faith

All you have to do is look at the reverted patches to see that these are either mythical or at least few and far in between.

To be clear, Linux kernel patches from good UMN researchers and students are rare. We have plenty of great people at the University of Minnesota, they just don't work on the Linux kernel.

It's justifiable and natural for our name to be dragged in the mud here, but as a run of the mill software engineer who graduated from UMN, I hope our reputation isn't soured too much.

Sure, I hope it was clear from my original comment I only question whether the UMN contributors to the kernel are acting in good faith. I have identified other questionable patches personally, out of curiosity. Naturally I tend to attribute them to ignorance rather than malice... except, that bad actors intentionally pushing bad patches to an OSS project will inevitably rely on people assuming ignorance rather than malice. This has been well-understood for decades.

Didn't they just blanket revert all patches from University of Minnesota?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26889550

Someone in this HN thread found kernel patches (at a guess, not among those now reverted?) from UMN dating back to 2008, -09, and -13 (IIRC). Probably by totally unrelated people.

So at least definitely not "totally mythical".

> This is similar to initiating fluid mechanics experiments on the wings of a Lufthansa A320 in flight to Frankfurt with a load of Austrians.

This analogy is invalid, because:

1. The experiment is not on live, deployed, versions of the kernel.

2. There are mechanisms in place for preventing actual merging of the faulty patches.

3. Even if a patch is merged by mistake, it can be easily backed out or replaced with another patch, and the updates pushed anywhere relevant.

All of the above is not true for the in-flight airline.

However - I'm not claiming the experiment was not ethically faulty. Certainly, the U Minnesota IRB needs to issue a report and an explanation on its involvement in this matter.

> 1. The experiment is not on live, deployed, versions of the kernel.

The patches were merged and the email thread discusses that the patches made it to the stable tree. Some (many?) distributions of Linux have and run from stable.

> 2. There are mechanisms in place for preventing actual merging of the faulty patches.

Those mechanisms failed.

> 3. Even if a patch is merged by mistake, it can be easily backed out or replaced with another patch, and the updates pushed anywhere relevant.

Arguably. But I think this is a weak argument.

> The patches were merged

The approved methodology - described in the linked paper - was that when a patch with the introduced vulnerabilities is accepted by its reviewer, the patch submitter indicates that the patch introduces a vulnerability exists, and sends a no-vulnerability version. That's what the paper describes.

If the researchers did something other than what the methodology called for (and what the IRB approved), then perhaps the analogy may be valid.

There are literally mails in that list pointing out that commits made it to stable. At least read the damn thing before repeating the professor's/student's nonsense lies.

The mails in the pointed-to threads indicate that commits by those UMin people made it to stable; it does not say that commits which introduce bugs made it to stable - it is following a decision/suggestion to back out all patches by these people to the kernel.

There is further indication that the patches to revert are not mostly/not at all vulnerability-introducing patches in a message by "Steve" which says:

> The one patch from Greg's reverts that affects my code was actually a legitimate fix

So, again, while it is still theoretically possible that vulnerabilities were introduced into stable, that is not known to be the case.

You seem to think this experiment was performed on the Linux kernel itself. It was not. This research was performed on human beings.

It's irrelevant whether any bugs were ultimately introduced into the kernel. The fact is the researchers deliberately abused the trust of other human beings in order to experiment on them. A ban on further contributions is a very light punishment for such behavior.

You seem to think I condone the experiment because I described an analogy as invalid.

How would you feel about researchers delivering known-faulty-under-some-conditions AoA sensors to Boeing, just to see if Boeing's QA process would catch those errors before final assembly?

I would feel that you are switching analogies...

This analogy is pretty valid, the in-flight-experiment analogy is invalid.

Is it? Linux underpins many medical devices - it too could lead to life and death consequences

You are ignoring the problematic experiment's methodology, which explicitly prevents the problematic patches from making it in by drawing attention to the vulnerability after they are accepted.

Now, if this protocol were not followed, that's a different story, but we do not know this to be the case.

So is Greg K-H a liar when he said some were accepted into stable?

He didn't say vulnerabilities were accepted into stable, he said patches by these people were accepted.

I would feel that I'm wasting time that I could be using to find out why Boeing makes this possible (or any other corporate or government body with a critical system).

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