Comment by svarog-run
4 years ago
I feel like q lot of people here did not interpret this correctly.
As far as it's known, garbage code was not introduced into kernel.It was caught in the review process literally on the same day.
However, there has been merged code from the same people, which is not necessarily vulnerable. As a precaution the older commits are also being reverted, as these people have been identified as bad actors
Note that the commits which have been merged previously have also been intentionally garbage and misleading code, just without any obvious way to exploit them. For example, https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20210407000913.2207831-1-pakki0... has been accepted since April 7, and it's an obviously a commit meant to _look_ like a bug fix while having no actual effect. (The line `rm = NULL;` and the line `if (was_on_sock && rm)` operate on different variables called `rm`.)
That means that the researchers got bogus code into the kernel, got it accepted, and then said nothing for two weeks as the bogus commit spread through the Linux development process and ended up in the stable tree, and, potentially, in forks.