[Discuss] With AI, 2, 000 Vulnerabilities per Linux kernel release

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

Companies that have really terrible security breaches?mostly don't get 
punished. After a few weeks of bad publicity the stock of publicly 
traded companies tends to go right back to where is was, like nothing 
every happened.

We don't care about security because it is a waste of money. Exasperating!

There is a major security problem that dates back over a half-century: 
When C was designed they were all clever and decided to make pointers 
and arrays and strings all kind of the same. People objected at the 
time, but we were assured that "we'll be careful, we're not idiots".

There /is/ something that we really haven't tried: Building secure 
systems from the start. But that is also a money losing proposition. We 
worship "feature velocity" and actually stopping to decide what to build 
and maybe even design it? No way, that would sow things down and be too 
expensive.

This evening I see there is an "urgency=high" update to Chromium for my 
machine. A whole lot of use-after-free and uninitialized-data and 
buffer-overflow and out-of-bounds bugs that weren't supposed to happen 
in C, because we promised we would be careful.

Grrr.

I will note that there are also a lot lines that read "drop, no longer 
needed with newer rust"!

Rust is a full-featured language, so one can write bugs in Rust, too. 
But a whole lot of bugs will not be in code that the compiler is happy 
with. And Google has spent enough time rewriting Chromium in Rust and 
they have been doing it long enough, that they are already rolling out 
lots of Rust changes for things that are no longer needed.

I will also note that the Linux kernel now has Rust, which is 
particularly valuable for device drivers. As with application code 
where, if it compiles it frequently just works, authors of Linux drivers 
are also noticing that if it compiles it frequently just works. For 
kernel drivers!

Rust adoption is moving along well, and for new projects it is 
frequently the best choice. Security is a big reason.


-kb