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Comment by serial_dev | Hacker News Reader

> How can I help people out when they tell me that io_uring is insecure?

Maybe those people are right, though? I think the discussion starts from a place that assumes other people are wrong. If you start there, you will fail to convince people of anything, because you automatically dismiss their claim, without thinking about what they might have seen and what they might think.

A better starting point would be wanting to get to the bottom of it, and assess the security of io_uring. If you start from that point and you give it an honest, thorough assessment, and it turns out it "looks secure", you'll have an easier time convincing people.

You might still be wrong (assessing io_uring's security is not trivial), but at least you tried to understand why people think that.

And reminder: it's ok to "agree to disagree".

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People are saying: "Oxygen is blue and that's why the sky is blue." Someone is replying: "The sky isn't blue because of the oxygen." You are then saying: "Well what if the people who are saying that the sky is blue because of oxygen are right."

Although it gets a bit more complicated, the statement `io_uring` is insecure might be true, that's not really in dispute here. The people who are saying it, aren't saying it because they know it to be true, they are saying it because they heard about security issues in the context of `io_uring` and assumed that using `io_uring` would make your code less secure.

This is incorrect, the security issues are in security features in Linux which have not been updated to handle `io_uring`. This means that your application won't be any less/more secure when using `io_uring`. But your system might be less secure if you have support for `io_uring` enabled and applications can make use of it.

Moreover, the "security issues" are only undoing security related hardening you would have put in place over the baseline, they're not putting you below baseline.

That's why a statement such as `io_uring` is insecure isn't very useful.

If these people make the argument that: "I don't want to use `io_uring` because that would mean that security conscious system administrators would not want to run my software as a precaution." then it would make sense and nobody would be disputing it.

> Maybe those people are right, though? I think the discussion starts from a place that assumes other people are wrong.

I think this is the right approach. We know that io_uring has a somewhat significant history of critical security issues. It's not enough just to point out that "these 3 critical CVEs were fixed in the last 12 months, it's secure now!"

Reputation and trust has to be built over a long period of time.

> Maybe those people are right, though? I think the discussion starts from a place that assumes other people are wrong. If you start there, you will fail to convince people of anything, because you automatically dismiss their claim, without thinking about what they might have seen and what they might think.

Bingo. This is the correct approach. Very well said!

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