News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:CopyFail was not disclosed to Gentoo developer by ori_b on Thursday April 30, 2026 @02:17PM (#47966295)
Basic care would involve making sure the patches had made it into the wild before ending the embargo, and nagging the relevant parties if not.

Edit: As of this writing, most distros including Redhat, Fedora, Debian Stable, do not have patches available in the package repos, though they're being actively worked on.

Re:CopyFail was not disclosed to Gentoo developer by sgjohnson on Thursday April 30, 2026 @02:24PM (#47966383)
Not true, if there’s any evidence of the exploit being used in the wild, it’s much more responsible to release immediately.

Considering that the patches have been available for a while, someone surely reversed what they were for and was actually exploiting this in the wild.

In the age of AI, I’d argue that “responsible disclosure” is dead. Arguably even in closed source projects. Just ask Claude to do a diff between the previous version and to see whether anything fixed in there could have had security implications.

We’re not there yet, but very soon the only way to responsibly disclose a vulnerability will be immediately.

Re:CopyFail was not disclosed to Gentoo developer by ori_b on Thursday April 30, 2026 @02:51PM (#47966691)
But they didn't release immediately -- they waited a month, but forgot to tell the distros, and forgot to check if waiting a month had actually lead to distros picking up the patches and shipping them.
Re:CopyFail was not disclosed to Gentoo developer by sgjohnson on Thursday April 30, 2026 @09:04PM (#47970265)
Which just reinforces my point. The patch was available, therefore, where the exploit lies was also available.

Linux kernel is one of the most audited open-source projects ever. I guarantee you that someone did reverse the patch.

> but forgot to tell the distros

Probably an oversight, but irrelevant. The bug was in the linux kernel. It's insane to suggest that they should have notified everyone shipping the linux kernel.

Re:CopyFail was not disclosed to Gentoo developer by semiquaver on Thursday April 30, 2026 @02:22PM (#47966363)
“Made it into the wild?” Patches landed a month ago. Should they also wait until my linksys router from 2018 has a patch ready?
Re:CopyFail was not disclosed to Gentoo developer by ori_b on Thursday April 30, 2026 @02:26PM (#47966398)
Patches are still in the process of landing in most major distros as of the time of this writing. Most users are not able to get an update through their distro's packaging mechanisms.
Re:CopyFail was not disclosed to Gentoo developer by SoftTalker on Thursday April 30, 2026 @02:42PM (#47966592)
It's a local vulnerability at least. How many people do you let log in to your router?

With the way linux is used these days, I'd guess the number of systems with untrusted local users is pretty limited. Even with shared hosting, you generally have root in your VM or container anyway. Unless this enables an escape from that?

Still the risk that people who run "curl | bash" without care could get bitten, but usually its "curl | sudo bash" anyway...

Re:CopyFail was not disclosed to Gentoo developer by sjpb on Thursday April 30, 2026 @03:54PM (#47967420)
> With the way linux is used these days, I'd guess the number of systems with untrusted local users is pretty limited

Things like HPC clusters are multiuser & don't entirely trust their users. If they did we wouldn't need users/groups/permissions etc in the first place.

Re:CopyFail was not disclosed to Gentoo developer by cozzyd on Thursday April 30, 2026 @06:15PM (#47968941)
Yes. Not even just HPC clusters, shared login servers are pretty common in academia. I manage several in our lab. Sure, we mostly trust the users against malice more or less but not so much against incompetence. A malicious vscode plugin would run rampant in this space.

And then there are users running claude-cli and friends who may just find it convenient to use a local root exploit to remove obstacles.

Re:CopyFail was not disclosed to Gentoo developer by sgbeal on Thursday April 30, 2026 @02:54PM (#47966728)
> Even with shared hosting, you generally have root in your VM or container

Lots of shared hosters don't use VMs or containers. It's some arbitrary number of people logging in to a shared system, each one with a home directory under /home/THE_USER_NAME. i've had several such hosters over the years (thankfully not right now, though).

Re:CopyFail was not disclosed to Gentoo developer by michaelmrose on Thursday April 30, 2026 @03:00PM (#47966791)
Local root is part of the path to escaping
Re:CopyFail was not disclosed to Gentoo developer by dist-epoch on Thursday April 30, 2026 @03:07PM (#47966876)
With this exploit it's trivial to jump from one container to another neighbor container. I've tried it and succeeded.

So containers don't protect you, only a VM.

Re:CopyFail was not disclosed to Gentoo developer by SoftTalker on Thursday April 30, 2026 @03:16PM (#47966989)
So anyone pulling a malicious dockerfile jeopardizes the host? That would be bad...
Re:CopyFail was not disclosed to Gentoo developer by ori_b on Thursday April 30, 2026 @05:27PM (#47968438)
...no shit? Why do you think people care about this issue?
Re:CopyFail was not disclosed to Gentoo developer by ranger_danger on Friday May 01, 2026 @12:50AM (#47971398)
> I've tried it and succeeded.

How so?

Re:CopyFail was not disclosed to Gentoo developer by GrayShade on Thursday April 30, 2026 @02:52PM (#47966703)
Fedora is patched.
Re:CopyFail was not disclosed to Gentoo developer by staticassertion on Thursday April 30, 2026 @05:41PM (#47968586)
That's mostly on Greg, a bit on the author.