Fixing all memory corruption bugs is infeasible without fundamentally changing the way Linux is developed. There is so much code (and it’s being added to, changed, etc.) written by humans that make mistakes.
There will always be some bugs that are in between being discovered (by someone, maybe malicious, maybe not), and being fixed. How else do you prevent against vulnerabilities in that stage?
Re:Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”
by banachtarski on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @03:59AM
(#15755389)
Linus' response is that calling it an infeasible problem is a cop-out. The right way to go about it is to fix them all, incrementally if need be, and not break userland in the process.
Re:Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”
by unityByFreedom on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @08:30AM
(#15756586)
These comments sound analogous to real world security and societal issues. Like, the desire to increase army size and addressing the underlying issues.
One is a short term solution, the other long term.
As a developer, I do want the report. But if you killed the user program in the process, I'm actually _less_ likely to get the report, because the latent access was most likely in some really rare and nasty case, or we would have found it already.
I dont think Linus has an invalid point there. Taken from his previous thread - https://www.spinics.net/lists/kernel/msg2540934.html
> Don't bother with grsecurity. Their approach has always been "we don't care if we break anything, we'll just claim it's because we're extra secure".
He is worried that grsecurity does not play nice with the kernel in a way of "let's make security hardening obsolete by fixing bugs in the kernel".