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Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel

576 points · 408 comments · luispa

john_strinlai · 1790902914 · focus · HN ↗
note that _any_ bugfix is assigned a cve, which makes for big numbers.
>“Due to the layer at which the Linux kernel is in a system, almost any bug might be exploitable to compromise the security of the kernel… Because of this, the CVE assignment team is overly cautious and assign CVE numbers to any bugfix that they identify.”
<a href="https://docs.kernel.org/process/cve.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.kernel.org/process/cve.html
"number of cves" is a useless metric, especially when it comes to the kernel.
1. SAI_Peregrinus · 1790903533 · focus · HN ↗
  Tautologically every bug can legitimately be assigned a CVE, since every bug prevents some feature from working as intended. It's therefore a denial of service, which by the definition of the CVE system using CVSS means every bug is at least a 1/Low level vulnerability to CVSS v4.0.
  If you're willing to stretch, missing but planned features also deny the use of said features since they haven't been added yet, and so are CVSS 1/Low vulnerabilities.
  Resume-driven development for security researchers has never been easier!
  1. viraptor · 1790906802 · focus · HN ↗
    > It's therefore a denial of service
    That doesn't follow. In the extremely simple example, an adding service returning 1+1=3 has a bug, but it's not a possible DoS situation at all.
    > missing but planned features also deny the use of said features
    That's not what DoS is.
    This whole situation with CVE assigning comes from the whole process being far from ideal. But it doesn't mean it's completely useless and doesn't follow any rules at all.
    nikanj · 1790919039 · focus · HN ↗
    That’s not what Mitre thinks though, they are very happy to host a 9.8 severity CVE for 1+1=3. They’ll probably publish one for 1-1=0 too, if you preface with ”The users of mathematics might not be prepared for zero values”
    viraptor · 1790929285 · focus · HN ↗
    You're memeing on bad cve handling, but that's so far outside of what the real issues are, it just doesn't make sense. How about telling people about what the real problems with vulnerability classification are, rather than mitre=bad?
    nikanj · 1790929960 · focus · HN ↗
    The real problem with vulnerability classification is that mitre=bad
    <a href="https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/06/24/a-cve-dispute/" rel="nofollow">https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/06/24/a-cve-dispute/
    literalAardvark · 1790939605 · focus · HN ↗
    Not really. cURL developers just have NIH syndrome.
    Organizations that track their software and patch systems for CVEs have their own risk management system.
    Publish xlow as low, we'll filter them out if we want to. As even they state in that article, they do NOT have the necessary context to filter stuff out. So why are they doing it?
    woodruffw · 1790943741 · focus · HN ↗
    From experience: many companies have a “risk management system” that involves nagging OSS projects to do free work for them, even when the advisory is manifestly nonsense or has no impact in context. Many teams have a “green dot” mindset, and CVE directly encourages that behavior by stapling CVSS scores to identifiers.
    kbolino · 1790953849 · focus · HN ↗
    > cURL developers just have NIH syndrome.
    What does this even mean? cURL is one of the most load-bearing pieces of software in existence. It, and the Linux kernel, which takes a similarly dim view of the CVE system, are the inventors. "Not Invented Here" seems to imply that there is a vast body of peer work for them to draw on to resolve this problem, but who are their peers? As far as I can tell, the answer is something like "Microsoft and Apple", on the one hand, who exist in a totally different, mostly closed-source or at least closed-development, ecosystem, or something like "glibc and OpenSSL" on the other hand, which have their own storied CVE history.
    dzhiurgis · 1791153234 · focus · HN ↗
    > cURL is one of the most load-bearing pieces of software in existence.
    Is it really, or it's trivially replaceable by wget?
    kbolino · 1791159403 · focus · HN ↗
    You may never have dug that deep into their respective documentation, and you may never have even heard of libcurl, but their superficial overlap in ability to download a single file from an HTTP server does not make them "trivially replaceable" with each other (in either direction).
    Regardless, even if hypothetical product X could do everything cURL and libcurl do for most people, that wouldn't make cURL/libcurl much less load-bearing, any more than the existence of FreeBSD or Illumos make Linux less load-bearing.
    viraptor · 1790942599 · focus · HN ↗
    Tell us about a system for managing vulnerability database that works across enterprise, private and open source, is staffed enough to research both impact and disputes, is funded enough to work for decades, isn't partisan to any industry interests, can classify vulnerabilities in a non ambiguous way, can handle public submissions at any volume in a timely manner...
    and one that will never make decisions that is incorrect or disliked by any party.
    nikanj · 1791025887 · focus · HN ↗
    I'll get back to this conversation after Mitre publicly says "We handled CVE-123 wrong". Everybody gets one wrong sometimes, but what happens after that
    viraptor · 1791026715 · focus · HN ↗
    The linked article ends with mitre confirming the outcome is what the curl project wanted. The dispute process is there exactly because some cases are ambiguous, or hard, or people involved are annoying. Whenever there are two sides with a dispute, one will likely claim Mitre handled something wrong, by definition of a dispute. They get to make decisions. So what exactly do you want from this case? Perfect decision making every time? They're handling thousands of cases and there will always be mistakes at that scale - some will be subjective things that people will disagree about forever.

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