This vulnerability is, for some threat models, a really big deal. A security group found the vulnerability. They disclosed it. It was patched.
Folks here have gotten all kinds of bent out of shape that the groups involved didnt do things in the way each internet commenter would have liked. But this is the system working.
This vulnerability is, for other threat models, a death sentence.
> A security group found the vulnerability. They disclosed it. It was patched.
It was patched only after some people who should have been notified well in advance happened to notice something was up. That is NOT HOW IT'S SUPPOSED TO WORK.
For as long as the unpatched window remains open, skids will mess around and break things. Organized crime teams will use it for some really nasty hacking/ransomware/exfil/extortion/whatever. I guarantee you, this vuln is powerful and widespread enough that intel orgs will use it to kill targets, if they haven't already been using it for years. And if they have, we can just bank on them pulling out all the stops to take advantage of the remaining time for wreaking havoc. Make a project out of it and see if you can guess some of the future headlines.
Certain folks might not care much because they are citizens of one or more of those orgs' nations, so those targets are welcome to die in their opinion. That's fine. You do you, I'll do me, we'll all just go on doing our thing. But it's all fun and games until the wrong target gets hit and now there's a pact between the Germans and the Austrians being invoked and a few dozen million Europeans die. Or a geopolitical hotspot flares up and overnight 20% of the global petroleum supply chain grinds to a halt. Use your imagination. This vuln is a digital magic wand that is trivially usable to cast Avada Kedavra and somebody neglected to tell 99.99% of the Good Guys about it.
How is this different from any other day? Because now we've got a world-changing vuln out in the wild with no distro mitigation on day 1, and who the hell knows how many unscrupulous actors poised to take advantage of it before the fun and games stops. There will be no adults in the room when the miscreants decide to deploy while they still can.
Is this vuln going to start the next world war? Probably not. I don't expect it to and I hope and pray it doesn't. But leaving a vuln like this undisclosed to the very people whose job it is to protect us all is playing with fire. Not matches; more like a 10-grams-less-than-critical mass of plutonium.
sam is right to be pissed and he's doing a very good job of hiding it, because he knows that his users are at the mercy of TPTB in the Linux kernel world. Somebody's head needs to roll for this, and I don't mean some dude the CIA wants to hax0r because he's next on the list.
A Linux LPE is a nothingburger unless you’re relying on the Linux kernel to enforce internal security boundaries, which would simply be foolish.
Now, y'all tell me, since I'm not a web guy. How hard is it going to be to tweak this lovely little pathogen into some kind of browser exploit? It just needs to be combined with a sandbox escape to work on current versions, right? Difficult but quite worth investing the time and effort to develop if that's your line of business. If that happens, every at-risk Tails user is going to have to stay offline for a while, unless they want to play the drone lottery.
Or how about chaining it with any of the as-yet unpatched bugs in gawd-only-knows how many web services out there that have poor input sanitization code? That bug now graduates from a DoS crash causer to a root grab. Good luck stopping it with your fancy AI Behavioral Analysis security tools. They better be fast. The sploit is going to do its work in two packets, maybe three. Fun times.
Lucky for us systems monkeys, it's not like anybody is spending billions of dollars to develop vuln finding AI tools right at this very second. So there shouldn't be many unpatched web services holes.
Oh, wait.
Of course, as the grey hats can already tell you, the really delicious part of this thing is how it's going to become the LPE tool of first resort for any APT that's already inside ur base killin ur doodz.
Nothingburger? This nothingburger is going to root a million OS instances before we know what hit us.
Not sure what the solution could/should be, but surely there could be a better, easier mechanism for kernel to advise all distro maintainers who care, and for those distro maintainers to subscribe in some way. Whether any distro maintainers do so (let alone do something about the vuln notifications) would be entirely up to them. There could also be some easier way for end users to see what the distros' policies on this are, such that they can take that into account when selecting a distro.
We don’t have to agree, but the site rules are pretty clear that swipes like that aren’t ok.
That kind of distro maintainers and kernel devs communication path already exists: the linux-distros@ mailing list. But since anybody can read it, posting “hey everybody, this is a security patch” has basically the same effect as the security researcher posting, in terms of disclosing the vuln to bad actors.
Given that anybody can make a Linux distro, and Linux distros aren’t generally either capable or interested in background checking their teams or policing their individual security practice, it doesn’t seem possible to have a communication channel that distros can sign up for that lacks this problem.