Re:Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit
by akoboldfrying on Friday May 08, 2026 @01:24AM
(#48058921)
Do you have a specific library in mind? I think it would have to be an ancient, unmaintained C library.
But I think most OSS code isn't like this -- even C code born long ago, if it's still in wide use, has been hardened by now. Examples: Linux kernel, GNU userland, PostgreSQL, Python.
Re:Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit
by bigiain on Friday May 08, 2026 @02:31AM
(#48059406)
> even C code born long ago, if it's still in wide use, has been hardened by now. Examples: Linux kernel
There have been two LPE vulnerability and exploits in the Linux kernel announced today. After the one announced just last week. I don't think as much of the C code born long ago has been as carefully hardened as you think.
(Copy Fail 2 and Dirty Frag today, and Copy Fail last week)
Re:Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit
by seba_dos1 on Friday May 08, 2026 @03:27AM
(#48059837)
One. "Copy Fail 2" and "Dirty Frag" are the same thing.
Re:Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit
by Brian_K_White on Friday May 08, 2026 @06:26AM
(#48061145)
And consideing the size of the kenel, I call this stupendously good.
You (anyone, not you personally) write that much code yourself and let's see how well you did in comparison.
Re:Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit
by pixl97 on Friday May 08, 2026 @02:34PM
(#48067005)
But that's the attacker advantage. You can do things right a billion times and one mistake will still take you down.
Re:Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit
by bigiain on Saturday May 09, 2026 @01:07AM
(#48071992)
Are you sure? I'd really like that to be true, I felt bad finishing up work on Friday evening having applied the Dirty Frag mitigation to all our instances, but knowing (thinking?) the Copy Fail 2 vulnerability was still exploitable.
Re:Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit
by seba_dos1 on Saturday May 09, 2026 @04:39AM
(#48073216)
Technically there are two things that need to be fixed in the kernel indeed (and one of them was fixed already), but they're both under the "Dirty Frag" umbrella and the proposed mitigation to not allow the affected modules to load applies to them both.
Re:Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit
by akoboldfrying on Friday May 08, 2026 @04:03AM
(#48060098)
Sure, I didn't mean to say that these examples are guaranteed 100% safe -- just that I trust them to be enormously more safe than software that accomplishes the same task that was hand-written by either a human or an an LLM last week.
Have you read this old code? It's terrible and written with no care at all to security often in C. AI is much much better at writing code.