Re: Report on University of Minnesota Breach-of-Trust Incident

From: Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
To: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Kangjie Lu <kjlu@umn.edu>,
	tech-board@lists.linux-foundation.org
Subject: Re: Report on University of Minnesota Breach-of-Trust Incident
Date: Thu, 6 May 2021 23:40:09 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20210506214009.GA6494@amd> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <202105061042.E99B414F0A@keescook>

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Hi!

> > # Commits from @umn.edu addresses have been found to be submitted in "bad
> > # faith" to try to test the kernel community's ability to review "known
> > # malicious" changes.
> 
> I would agree that the phrasing here is sub-optimal in that it could
> more clearly separate a few related things (e.g. "malicious change" vs
> "valid fix"). If I were writing this, I would have said something along
> the lines of:
> 
>   Commits from UMN authors have been found to be submitted with intentional
>   flaws to try to test the kernel community's ability to review "known
>   malicious" changes. ...
>   During review of all submissions, some patches were found to be
>   unintentionally flawed. ...
>   Out of an abundance of caution all submissions from this group must be
>   reverted from the tree and will need to be re-review again. ...

Thank you.

> > UMN apologized. Our reaction to their apology was:
> > 
> > https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YIV+pLR0nt94q0xQ@kroah.com/#t
> > 
> > Do we owe them apology, too?
> 
> I will defer to Greg on what he thinks his duties are there, but in
> trying to figure out who "we" is, I'll just point out that I attempted
> to clarify the incorrect assumptions about the intent of historical UMN
> patches, and spoke for the entire TAB (Greg included) here:
> https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/202104221451.292A6ED4@keescook/
> The report repeated this in several places, and we explained our need
> for due diligence.

Well, in https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YIV+pLR0nt94q0xQ@kroah.com/#t
Greg says:

"Until those actions are taken, we do not have anything further to
discuss about this issue."

I'm not sure on behalf of whom he is speaking in the email (and I
believe he is unneccessarily harsh with them).

I could reply to that saying "hey, Greg is probably speaking only for
himself there, he certainly can't speak for whole linux community",
but I believe it would be better if TAB did that.

Best regards,
								Pavel
-- 
http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek

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