On Sat, May 24, 2003 at 08:42:39PM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > On Sat, May 24, 2003 at 02:34:17PM -0400, Matt Zimmerman wrote: > > What benefit is there in not announcing these problems? Security > > through obscurity? How can we inform our users of their exposure when > > we are not informed ourselves about security problems? > > Noise. You can's accnounce every possibly security-related fix found by > an audit - note that it's not clear whether it actually _is_ > security-relevant at this point and certainly no one wrote an exploit for > it.
You certainly can; other projects do. The presence of an exploit is irrelevant; we fix vulnerabilities all the time for which no exploit necessarily exists. It's not noise at all when it's something that we and others (desperately!) want to know about. > > It is infortunate if this must sometimes happen, but hopefully it is an > > exception, and in those cases we will need to rebuild modules and > > provide for both kernel images to be installed at once. > > It's not an exception. Fixes can and will change the ABI all the time. > You should not expect to be able to load a binary kernel module into _any_ > other one than the one it was compiled against. Sometimes security fixes > may even break the source API. (remember the dcache issues in > 2.2.<early>?). Compatibility is often broken for many other reasons as well; this does not mean that it is necessary for our purposes. -- - mdz
