Government agencies probably already have half of these exploits in their private toolbox for years now. Finding and patching them is good, but there probably needs to be some systematic change to prevent them rather than just patching bugs when they get found.
> for years now
ZCRX is less than half a year old. I'm so tired boss.
I've seen microkernels mentioned a few times between these LPE posts and I'm curious about why. Would they be fundamentally more secure against forgetting to add bounds checking, or assuming user-provided input buffers should be writable without checking?
Yes, because as a userspace program if you forget to do bounds checking or read the wrong thing, the kernel kills the process. But if the buggy code is the kernel then there’s no protection. Microkernels aim to have as little code as required in kernel space.
As other people said in this thread: so many devices won't be patched. And that can easily lead to users and manufacturers moving away from Linux. Linux is in a glass house.
I remember when people used to joke with Windows security and something like that would never happen on Linux, well..