Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”

Re:Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm” by teamhappy on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @09:18AM (#15756916)

Bugs in the hardening code are obviously bad and annoying but that's besides the point. All bugs are bad and annoying, especially ones that cause a kernel panic. I don't think anybody is going to argue with that.

That's not what Linus said though. What he said is:

    > when adding hardening features, the first step should *ALWAYS* be
    > "just report it". Not killing things, not even stopping the access.
    > Report it. Nothing else.

and:

    > All I need is that the whole "let's kill processes" mentality goes
    > away, and that people acknowledge that the first step is always "just
    > report".

"Not killing things, not even stopping the access." Oh boy.

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Re:Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm” by cesarb on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @09:36AM (#15757034)

Step back a bit: when developing a new selinux policy, won't you develop first on permissive mode, and only after it's working without warnings, enable enforcing mode? It's the same thing here: the hardening should be developed first in a "permissive" mode which only warns, and then, after it's shown to be working without warnings, changed to be "enforcing" (in this case however, after some time the "permissive" mode can be removed, since new code should be written with that hardening in mind).

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Re:Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm” by teamhappy on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @10:28AM (#15757476)

I didn't mean that to sound like I'm in favor of turning the thing on right away.

(Also, the quotes I chose don't really help me make my case but I don't want to edit now since you've already commented on it. His first mail is way worse: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/11/17/767)

Basically what I'm disagreeing with is that exploit mitigation's primary purpose is finding and fixing bugs. That's just not true. Its primary purpose is to protect users from exploitable bugs that we haven't found yet (but someone else might have).

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Re:Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm” by CJefferson on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @02:50PM (#15759936)

By first step, Linus just means "for a year or two". Yes it would be nice to put super high security on today, but instead we slowly turn up the setting, from opt in to opt out to forced on, to ensure we don't break anything.

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