Comment by WrtCdEvrydy
4 years ago
"We're writing research on the security systems involved around the Linux kernel, would it be acceptable to submit a set of patches to be reviewed for security concerns just as if it was a regular patch to the Linux kernel?"
This is what you do as a grownup and the other side is expected to honor your request and perform the same thing they do for other commits... the problem is that people think of pen testing as an adversarial relationship where one person needs to win over the other one.
That's not really testing the process, because now you have introduced bias. Once you know there's a bug in there, you can't just act as if you didn't know.
I guess you could receive "authorization" from a confidante who then delegates the work to unwitting reviewers, but then you could make the same "ethical" argument.
Again, from a hacker ethos perspective, none of this was unethical. From a "research ethics committee", maybe it was unethical, but that's not the standard I want applied to the Linux kernel.
> from a hacker ethos perspective, none of this was unethical.
It totally is if your goal as a hacker is generating a better outcome for security. Read the paper, see what they actually did, they just jerked themselves off over how they were better than the open source community, and generated a sum total of zero helpful recommendations.
So they subverted a process, introduced a Use After vulnerability and didn't do jack shit to improve it.
> It totally is if your goal as a hacker is generating a better outcome for security. Read the paper, see what they actually did, they just jerked themselves off over how they were better than the open source community, and generated a sum total of zero helpful recommendations.
The beauty of it is that by "jerking themselves off", they are generating a better outcome for security. In spirit, this reaction of the kernel team is not that different from Microsoft attempting to bring asshole hacker kids behind bars for exposing them. When Microsoft realized that this didn't magically make Windows more secure, they fixed the actual problems. Windows security was a joke in the early 2000s, now it's arguably better than Linux. Why? Because those asshole hacker kids actually changed the process.
> So they subverted a process, introduced a Use After vulnerability and didn't do jack shit to improve it.
The value added here is to show that the process could be subverted, the lessons are to be learned by someone else.
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This is the sort of situation where the best you could do is likely to be slightly misleading about the purpose of the experiment. So you'd lead off with "we're interested in conducting a study on the effectiveness of the Linux code review processes", and then use patches that have a mix of no issues, issues only with the Linux coding style (things go in the wrong place, etc.), only security issues, and both.
But at the end of the day, sometimes there's just no way to do ethically do the experiment you want to do, and the right solution to that is to just live with being unable to do certain experiments.
To play Devil's Advocate, I suspect that this would if different results because people behave differently when they know that there is something going on.
That's the thing, you just told the person to review the request for security... in a true double blind, you submit 10 PRs and see how many get rejected / approved.
If all 10 are rejected but only one had a security concern, then the process is faulty in another way.
Edit: There is this theory that penetration testing is adversarial but in the real world people want the best outcome for all. The kernel maintainers are professionals so I would expect the same level of caring for a "special PR" versus a "normal PR"
In a corporate setting, the solution would presumably be to get permission from further up the chain of command than the individuals being experimented upon. I think that would resolve the ethical problem, as no individual or organisation/project is then being harmed, although there is still an element of deception.
I don't know enough about the kernel's process to comment on whether the same approach could be taken there.
Alternatively, if the time window is broad enough, perhaps you could be almost totally open with everyone, withholding only the identity of the submitter. For a sufficiently wide time window, Be on your toes for malicious or buggy commits doesn't change the behaviour of the reviewers, as that's part of their role anyway.
There are ways to reach the Kernel Security team that doesn't notify all the reviewers. It is upto the Kernel team to decide if they want to authorize such a test, and what kind of testing is permissible.