Kernel-hack-drill and exploiting CVE-2024-50264 in the Linux kernel

>Convinced the path forward would be painful, I shelved the bug.

As opposed to fixing the bug? Either the incentives are broken for security researchers to fix bugs, contributing fixes to Linux is broken, or both.

A rewrite of these user interactable subsystems in Rust can't come soon enough.

Security researchers rarely fix bugs. They don't see it as their job, and it requires a very different skill set than finding or exploiting them anyway.

This is misplaced in this case.

The author mentioned CVE-2021-26708, which is very similar to this bug, and in fact the author both exploited it and authored the upstream fix in the kernel.

> and it requires a very different skill set than finding or exploiting them anyway

I disagree with that. Exploiting bugs is really hard, and if you can exploit them, you absolutely know enough about the kernel in order to patch it.

Sure, architecting a kernel, making code maintainable, that's a software engineering skill. But fixing a use-after-free? That's easier than exploiting it, of course they can fix it.

There’s the technical challenge, and then there’s the process challenge.

Sending an email with a simple patch is not a challenge.

Thanks for submitting the fix here!