> The thread then gets down to business and starts coordinating revert patches for everything committed by University of Minnesota email addresses.
What's preventing those bad actors from not using a UMN email address?
What's preventing those bad actors from not using a UMN email address?
Technically none, but by banning UMN submissions, the kernel team have sent an unambiguous message that their original behaviour is not cool. UMN's name has also been dragged through the mud, as it should be.
Prof Lu exercised poor judgement by getting people to submit malicious patches. To use further subterfuge knowing that you've been already been called out on it would be monumentally bad.
I don't know how far Greg has taken this issue up with the university, but I would expect that any reasonable university would give Lu a strong talking-to.
They gain some trust comming from university email addresses
edit: Reference to combat the downvote: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/china/american-universities-are...
If they just want to be jerks, yes. But they can't then use that type of "hiding" to get away with claiming it was done for a University research project as that's even more unethical than what they are doing now.
Sabotage is a very real risk but we're discussing ethics of demonstrating the risk instead of potential remediation, that's dangerous and foolish.
It really doesn't though. You can claim ownership of that email address in the published manuscript. For that matter, you could even publish the academic article under a pen name if you wanted to. But after seeing how the maintainers responded here, you'd better make sure that any "real" contributions you make aren't associated with the activity in any way.
What would you like them to do instead or in addition to this?
Update the processes and tools to try and catch such malicious infiltrators. Lynching researchers isn't fixing the actual issue right now.
How?
I think "lamenting" is very much the wrong attitude here. Given all the things that make use of Linux today that seems like the only sane approach to me.
You're criticizing the process, but the truth is that without a real name email and an actual human being's "social credit" to be burned, there's no proof these researchers would have achieved the same findings. The more interesting question to me is if they had used anonymous emails, would they have achieved the same results? If so, there might be some substance to your contrarian views that the process itself is flawed. But as it stands, I'm not sure that's the case.
Why? Well, look at what happened. The maintainers found out and blanket banned bad actors. Going to be a little hard to reproduce that research now, isn't it? Arbitraging societal trust for research doesn't just bring ethical challenges but /practical/ ones involving US law and standards for academic research.
How are kernel maintainers competent in detecting a real person vs. fake real person? Why is there any inherit trust?
It's clear the system is fallible, but at least now people are humbled enough to not instantly dismiss the risk.
> The maintainers found out and blanket banned bad actors.
With collateral damage.
Anonymity is de facto, not de jure. It's also a privilege for many collaboration networks and not a right. If abused, it will simply be removed.
Given what the Linux kernel runs these days, that would probably be advisable. (I'm a strong proponent of anonymity, but I also have a preference that my devices not be actively sabotaged.)
> we're entering the territory of fraud and cybercrime
So what? The fact that it's illegal doesn't nullify the threat. For that matter, it's not even a crime if a state agency is the perpetrator. These researchers drew attention to a huge (IMO) security issue. They should be thanked and the attack vector carefully examined.
If you want to talk about a state level actor, I hate to break it to you, but they have significantly more powerful and stealthier 0-day exploits that are a lot easier to exploit than a tactic like this. Guess what's the last thing you want to have happen when you commit cybercrime? Do it in public with where there's an immutable record that can be traced back to you, and cause a giant public hubbub, maybe? So, I can't imagine how someone could think there's anything noteworthy about this unless they were unaware of that.
That's somewhat the unintentional humor and irony of this situation -- all the researchers accomplished was proving that they were not just unethical but incompetent.
However, I don't agree that what happened was abuse or that it should be deterred. Responding in a hostile manner to an isolated demonstration of a vulnerability isn't constructive. People rightfully get angry when large companies try to bully security researchers.
You question if this vulnerability is worth worrying about due to the logistics of exploiting it in practice. Regardless of whether it's worth the effort to exploit I'd still rather it wasn't there (that goes for all vulnerabilities).
I think it would be much easier to exploit than you're letting on though. Modern attacks frequently chain many subtle bugs together. Being able to land a single, seemingly inconsequential bug in a key location could enable an otherwise impossible approach.
It seems unlikely to me that the immutable record you mention would ever lead back to a competent entity that didn't want to be found. There's no need for anything more than an ephemeral identity that successfully lands one or two patches and then disappears. The patches also seem unlikely to draw suspicion in the first place, even after the exploit itself becomes known.
In fact it occurs to me that a skilled and amoral developer could likely land multiple patches with strategic (and very subtle) bugs from different identities. These could then be "discovered" and sold on the black market. I see no convincing reason to discount the possibility of this already being a common occurrence.
The only sensible response I can think of is a focus on static analysis coupled with CTF challenges to beat those analysis methods.