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Comment by _d7dt | Hacker News Reader

What's next, will they prove how easy it is to break into kernel developers' houses and rob them? Or prove how easy it is to physically assault kernel developers by punching them in the face at conferences? Or prove how easy it is to manipulate kernel developers to lose their life savings investing in cryptocurrency? You can count me out of those...

Sarcasm aside, pentesting/redteaming is only ethical if the target consents to it! Please don't try to prove your point the way these researchers have.

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Just playing devil advocate here, the surprising factor does play into it. No bad actor will ever give you heads-up.

If the researcher has sent these patches under a different identity, that would be just like how malice contributions appear. The maintainers won't assume malice, waste a bunch of time communicating with the bad actor, and may NOT revert their previous potentially harmful contribution.

> the surprising factor does play into it. No bad actor will ever give you heads-up.

I too thought like this till yesterday. Then someone made me realize thats not how getting consent works in these situations. You take consent from higher up the chain, not the people doing the work. So Greg Kroah-Hartmancould could have been consulted, as he would not be personally reviewing this stuff. This would also give you a chance to understand how the release process works. You also have an advantage over the bad actors because they would be studying the process from outside.

it's not simple like that, if Greg doesn't do the work of review then who gives him the authority to consent on behalf of others?

I see what you are saying. But he is also sort of the director to this whole thing. The research question itself is worthwhile and I don't think if it was done properly this much time would be wasted. All they have to prove is that it will pass few code reviews. That's a few man hours and I really don't think people will be mad about that. This whole fiasco is about the scale of man hours wasted both because they repeatedly made these "attacks" and because this thing slipped into stable code. Both would be avoided in this scheme.

But I would like to put in a disclaimer that before getting to that point they could have done so many other things. Review the publicly available review processes, see how security bugs get introduced by accident and see if that can be easily done by a bad actor, etc.

the way it should work imho is contributors to be asked for consent (up-front, retroactively), that stealthy experiments would happen at some point. Given the vital role of the linux kernel, maybe they'll understand. And if they turn out to be under-resourced to be wasted on such things, then it would highlight the need for funding additional head count, factoring in that kind of experiments/attacks.

> No bad actor will ever give you heads-up.

Yes, and if you do it without a heads-up as well that makes you a bad actor. This university is a disgrace and that's what the problem is and should remain.

C'est la vie. There are many things that it would be interesting to know, but the ethics of it wouldn't play out. It would be interesting to see how well Greg Kroah-Hartman resists under torture, but that does not mean it is acceptable to torture him to see if he would commit malicious patches that way.

To take a more realistic example, we could quickly learn a lot more than today about language acquisition if we could separate a few children from any human contact to study how they learn from controlled stimuli. Still, we don't do this research and look for much more complicated and lossy, but more humane, methods to study the same.

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