Hi Greg,
On Sat, May 13, 2006 at 08:59:37PM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> On Sat, May 13, 2006 at 06:29:25PM +0100, Nick Warne wrote:
> > On 13/05/06, Adrian Bunk <[email protected]> wrote:
> > >The CVE should be enough for easily getting all information you
> > >requested.
> > >
> > >Information whether it's a DoS or a root exploit is helpful, but any
> > >qualified person doing risk management will anyways lookup the CVE.
> >
> > Well, yes, but some people do *actually* use the latest kernel at home
> > and not in labs (et al), and as Maciej asked, we are not sure whether
> > the (whatever) latest patch is needed or not on whatever our current
> > config is the way the latest stable fixes are announced.
> >
> > " [PATCH] fs/locks.c: Fix lease_init (CVE-2006-1860)
> >
> > It is insane to be giving lease_init() the task of freeing the lock it is
> > supposed to initialise, given that the lock is not guaranteed to be
> > allocated on the stack. This causes lockups in fcntl_setlease().
> > Problem diagnosed by Daniel Hokka Zakrisson <[email protected]>
> >
> > Also fix a slab leak in __setlease() due to an uninitialised return
> > value.
> > Problem diagnosed by Bj????rn Steinbrink.
> > "
> >
> > OK, great. But what does it mean?
> >
> > It would be nice to have a short explanation of what the fix is for in
> > real world terms.
>
> To be fair, the extra work of writing out a detailed exploit, complete
> with example code, for every security update, would just take way too
> long. If you look for where this patch was discussed on lkml, you will
> see a full description of the problem, and how to hit it.
I second this. I try to write detailed changes or at least to compact
the original explanations for patches that go into 2.4 hotfixes, and
sometimes I wonder if I don't do too much. It takes nearly 1/3 of the
time to get the patches in and compile the kernel, and 2/3 of the time
to write things that I sometimes think very few people will read. I
think that if i still do it, it's because I release far less often than
you and Chris do. Otherwise I would have given up.
One compromise might be to post the full changelog in the announcement
in addition to the shortlog. But I agree that security fixes are rarely
well documented by their authors, and CVE descriptions are sometimes
rather obscure :-(
> thanks,
>
> greg k-h
Regards,
Willy
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
[Index of Archives]
[Kernel Newbies]
[Netfilter]
[Bugtraq]
[Photo]
[Stuff]
[Gimp]
[Yosemite News]
[MIPS Linux]
[ARM Linux]
[Linux Security]
[Linux RAID]
[Video 4 Linux]
[Linux for the blind]
[Linux Resources]
