Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:42:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
To: pageexec@freemail.hu
cc: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>, Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, stable@kernel.org
Subject: Re: [stable] Linux 2.6.25.10
In-Reply-To: <487D2371.10258.1BDBBC00@pageexec.freemail.hu>
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On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, pageexec@freemail.hu wrote:
> 
> i understand and i think noone expects that. in fact, i know how much
> expertise and time it takes to determine that. but what happens when
> you do figure out the security relevance of a bug during bug submission

The issue is that I think it's then _misleading_ to mark that kind of 
commit specially, when I actually believe that it's in the minority.

If people think that they are safer for only applying (or upgrading to) 
certain patches that are marked as being security-specific, they are 
missing all the ones that weren't marked as such. Making them even 
_believe_ that the magic security marking is meaningful is simply a lie. 
It's not going to be.

So why would I add some marking that I most emphatically do not believe in 
myself, and think is just mostly security theater?

I generally do not remove peoples changelog entries, although I _will_ 
do even that if I think it's just too much of an actual exploit 
description (of course - the patch itself can make the exploit fairly 
clear). So you'll find CVE entries etc in the logs if you look.

But I do hope that anybody who looks for them is _aware_ that it's just a 
small minority of possible problems.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that security bugs are _common_, but 
especially some local DoS thing for a specific driver or filesystem or 
whatever can be a big security problem for _somebody_.

			Linus


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