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By your guess each new Linux release would have about 5000 new RCEs. So that's 25000-30000 new RCEs over the last year alone.

by megous 8y ago

ebeip90 8y ago
Probably only off by an order of magnitude. Check out Dmitry’s szykaller slides. https://events.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Syzbot-and-the-Tale-of-Thousand-Kernel-Bugs-Dmitry-Vyukov-Google.pdf https://events.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/1... Edit: I missed the “RCE” context. Most of these are just privescs or memory disclosures.
- loeg 8y ago
  Yes. For RCEs, it's hard to accurately compute, but probably off by at least two orders of magnitude (charitably).
- pizlonator 8y ago
  Wasn’t even serious about this, but now that y’all are playing along, I’ll just dig in for fun. It’s interesting that Linux kernel bug stats contradict my bold bet. But I’m imagining rando C code here, not necessarily open source, not necessarily in the kernel, not necessarily tested and reviewed the same way. This code is at least open source but I dunno to what extent this newly added code path in runc gets the kind of shaking out that makes kernel code solid. Runc aside, I expect most C code to have a higher rate of every kind of bug than the kernel.
  - TheDong 8y ago
    Large swathes of C code can't have an RCE by definition. Any C code which is not available on the network (e.g. C code running on your refrigerator) by definition cannot have a remote code execution vulnerability. Lots of software, such as the 'top' utility, makes no networking related calls in the codebase, so any instances of bugs would be buffer overflows or crashes, but not remotely exploitable by the usual meaning. I think that you vastly under-estimate how difficult it is to accidentally write a remotely exploitable bug. Sure, buffer overflows and undefined behavior happen all the time in C code. Those bugs might be 1 per 100 lines even in the average C code. of those, hardly any will be network exploitable. Relatively little code will be handling data sourced from the network.
    - pizlonator 8y ago
      That's sort of literally true except that it's hard to predict how code will be used in the future. For example, I bet that some dude writing an image decoder in the 90's was thinking "it's cool, I don't have to worry about security" because he just knew that his code wasn't going to be remotely exploitable. Anyway, my original comment was supposed to be as funny as your handle. I guess the humor ended up being just in how seriously folks took it. The part I'm not joking about is that folks always underestimate the amount of security bugs that will be found in a piece of code in the future, either because the code ends up used in a way that wasn't predicted, or because some really great bug was just waiting for the right kind of genius to uncover it.
pizlonator 8y ago
I wasn’t being completely serious. But taking the joke further, are you counting each release’s lines of code towards the RCEs or only new/modified code? If you’re counting all vise then you’re double counting RCEs. I wouldn’t double count.
- megous 8y ago
  New lines only. It's approx half a mil. new lines of code in each recent release.
pjmlp 8y ago
In 2018, 68% of Linux CVEs were caused by C's memory corruption features. Source, Google talk at Linux Kernel Summit 2018.
- wahern 8y ago
  And how many of those were related to the difficulty of managing IPC across user/kernel boundaries, DMA, mbuf-based networking code, eBPF JIT'ing, etc? So-called memory safe languages don't help with any of that. I'll take your memory safe languages and up the ante with microkernels, which actually help immensely in all those cases. But Linux isn't going to go that route, either.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Plenty of them related to lack of bounds checking handling strings and arrays. Google has been pushing for the Kernel Self Preservation project for quite a while now, which Android and ChromeOS make best use of, also a reason why the NDK is so constrained on Android. Security in the kernel also had quite a few talks at Linux Conf 2019, just recently in New Zealand.
- loeg 8y ago
  68% of N, where N « 30,000.
- geofft 8y ago
  See also Fish in a Barrel's Twitter account: https://twitter.com/LazyFishBarrel https://twitter.com/LazyFishBarrel The vast majority of security updates these days are memory unsafety. (Fish in a Barrel, LLC is a nonexistent security research "company" consisting of people setting up fuzzers on the weekend and then proceeding to shoot fish in a barrel.)

By your guess each new Linux release would have about 5000 new RCEs. So that's 25000-30000 new RCEs over the last year alone.

by megous 8y ago

By your guess each new Linux release would have about 5000 new RCEs. So that's 25000-30000 new RCEs over the last year alone.

ebeip90 8y ago

Probably only off by an order of magnitude. Check out Dmitry’s szykaller slides. https://events.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Syzbot-and-the-Tale-of-Thousand-Kernel-Bugs-Dmitry-Vyukov-Google.pdf https://events.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/1... Edit: I missed the “RCE” context. Most of these are just privescs or memory disclosures.

loeg 8y ago
Yes. For RCEs, it's hard to accurately compute, but probably off by at least two orders of magnitude (charitably).
pizlonator 8y ago
Wasn’t even serious about this, but now that y’all are playing along, I’ll just dig in for fun. It’s interesting that Linux kernel bug stats contradict my bold bet. But I’m imagining rando C code here, not necessarily open source, not necessarily in the kernel, not necessarily tested and reviewed the same way. This code is at least open source but I dunno to what extent this newly added code path in runc gets the kind of shaking out that makes kernel code solid. Runc aside, I expect most C code to have a higher rate of every kind of bug than the kernel.
- TheDong 8y ago
  Large swathes of C code can't have an RCE by definition. Any C code which is not available on the network (e.g. C code running on your refrigerator) by definition cannot have a remote code execution vulnerability. Lots of software, such as the 'top' utility, makes no networking related calls in the codebase, so any instances of bugs would be buffer overflows or crashes, but not remotely exploitable by the usual meaning. I think that you vastly under-estimate how difficult it is to accidentally write a remotely exploitable bug. Sure, buffer overflows and undefined behavior happen all the time in C code. Those bugs might be 1 per 100 lines even in the average C code. of those, hardly any will be network exploitable. Relatively little code will be handling data sourced from the network.
  - pizlonator 8y ago
    That's sort of literally true except that it's hard to predict how code will be used in the future. For example, I bet that some dude writing an image decoder in the 90's was thinking "it's cool, I don't have to worry about security" because he just knew that his code wasn't going to be remotely exploitable. Anyway, my original comment was supposed to be as funny as your handle. I guess the humor ended up being just in how seriously folks took it. The part I'm not joking about is that folks always underestimate the amount of security bugs that will be found in a piece of code in the future, either because the code ends up used in a way that wasn't predicted, or because some really great bug was just waiting for the right kind of genius to uncover it.

pizlonator 8y ago

I wasn’t being completely serious. But taking the joke further, are you counting each release’s lines of code towards the RCEs or only new/modified code? If you’re counting all vise then you’re double counting RCEs. I wouldn’t double count.

megous 8y ago
New lines only. It's approx half a mil. new lines of code in each recent release.

pjmlp 8y ago

In 2018, 68% of Linux CVEs were caused by C's memory corruption features. Source, Google talk at Linux Kernel Summit 2018.

wahern 8y ago
And how many of those were related to the difficulty of managing IPC across user/kernel boundaries, DMA, mbuf-based networking code, eBPF JIT'ing, etc? So-called memory safe languages don't help with any of that. I'll take your memory safe languages and up the ante with microkernels, which actually help immensely in all those cases. But Linux isn't going to go that route, either.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Plenty of them related to lack of bounds checking handling strings and arrays. Google has been pushing for the Kernel Self Preservation project for quite a while now, which Android and ChromeOS make best use of, also a reason why the NDK is so constrained on Android. Security in the kernel also had quite a few talks at Linux Conf 2019, just recently in New Zealand.
loeg 8y ago
68% of N, where N « 30,000.
geofft 8y ago
See also Fish in a Barrel's Twitter account: https://twitter.com/LazyFishBarrel https://twitter.com/LazyFishBarrel The vast majority of security updates these days are memory unsafety. (Fish in a Barrel, LLC is a nonexistent security research "company" consisting of people setting up fuzzers on the weekend and then proceeding to shoot fish in a barrel.)