In an announcement for the 2.6.25.10 stable kernel, Greg KH noted, "it contains a number of assorted bugfixes all over the tree. And once again, any users of the 2.6.25 kernel series are STRONGLY encouraged to upgrade to this release." The emphasis on the word strongly led to a lengthy discussion about how security fixes are handled in the Linux Kernel. Linus Torvalds replied, "I personally consider security bugs to be just 'normal bugs'. I don't cover them up, but I also don't have any reason what-so-ever to think it's a good idea to track them and announce them as something special." Later in the thread he went on to explain, "one reason I refuse to bother with the whole security circus is that I think it glorifies - and thus encourages - the wrong behavior. It makes 'heroes' out of security people, as if the people who don't just fix normal bugs aren't as important. In fact, all the boring normal bugs are _way_ more important, just because there's a lot more of them. I don't think some spectacular security hole should be glorified or cared about as being any more 'special' than a random spectacular crash due to bad locking."

Theodore T'so pointed out that other developers had different beliefs about disclosure than Linus and referred to mailing lists such as the private security@ list described in the SecurityBugs documentation, originally created in early 2005. He then described Linus' stance, "if Linus finds out about a security bug, he will fix it and check it into the public git repository right away. But he's very honest in telling you that is what he will do --- so you can choose whether or not to include him in any disclosures that you might choose to make." Regarding whether Full Disclosure is the best policy, Ted highlighted the fact that the debate has been going on for several decades, "it is clear that we're not going settle this debate now, and certainly not on the Linux Kernel Mailing List." Later in the discussion, Linus offered a succinct summary of his viewpoint, "my responsibility is to do a good job. And not pander to the people who want to turn security into a media circus."

"I've put together an automatic system for applying kernel security patches to the Linux kernel without rebooting it, and I wanted to share this system with the community in case others find it useful or interesting," said Jeff Arnold, announcing ksplice. He explained, "the system takes as input a kernel security patch (which can be a unified diff taken directly from Linus' GIT tree) and the source code corresponding to the running kernel, and it automatically creates a set of kernel modules to perform the update. The running kernel does not need to have been customized in advance in any way." The project's website notes, "ksplice cannot handle semantic changes to data structures—that is, changes that would require existing instances of kernel data structures to be transformed." With this limitation, Jeff suggested ksplice is still able to automatically apply 84% of the kernel security patches released between May 2005 and December 2007. He continued:

"I've been pursuing this project because I don't like dealing with reboots whenever a new local kernel security vulnerability is discovered. The rebootless update practices/systems that are already out there require manually constructing an update (through a process that can be tricky and error-prone), and they tend to have other disadvantages as well (such as requiring a custom kernel, not handling inline functions properly, etc). This new system works on existing kernels, and it simply takes a unified diff as input and does the rest on its own."

Patches for a much publicized Linux kernel local root exploit were released today as 2.6.24.2, 2.6.23.16, and 2.6.22.18. The latest bug, labeled as CVE-2008-0600, was introduced by the vmsplice() system call and added into the 2.6 kernel in 2.6.17. It is the third in a series of root exploits surrounding the same system call, the two earlier bugs being CVE-2008-0009 and CVE-2008-0010. Easily obtained exploits exist for both the older CVE-2008-0010 which affected the 2.6.23 and 2.6.24 kernels, and the latest CVE-2008-0600, allowing a local non-root user to gain root permissions.

"This document is intended to specify the security goal that AppArmor is intended to achieve, so that users can evaluate whether AppArmor will meet their needs, and kernel developers can evaluate whether AppArmor is living up to its claims. This document is *not* a general purpose explanation of how AppArmor works, nor is it an explanation for why one might want to use AppArmor rather than some other system," began Crispin Cowan, following Arjan van de Ven's earlier suggestion to document security module intent. Crispin continued:

"AppArmor is intended to protect systems from attackers exploiting vulnerabilities in applications that the system hosts. The threat is that an attacker can cause a vulnerable application to do something unexpected and undesirable. AppArmor addresses this threat by confining the application to access only the resources it needs to access to execute properly, effectively imposing 'least privilege' execution on the application.

"Applications have access to a number of resources including files, interprocess communication, networking, capabilities, and execution of other applications. The purpose of least privilege is to bound the damage that a malicious user or code can do by removing access to all resources that the application does not need for its intended function. For instance, a policy for a web server might grant read only access to most web documents, preventing an attacker who can corrupt the web server from defacing the web pages."

"I'd like to ask you to put a file in Documentation/ somewhere that describes what AppArmor's intended security protection is (it's different from SELinux for sure for example); by having such a document for each LSM user, end users and distros can make a more informed decision which module suits their requirements..." Arjan van de Ven suggested in an attempt to help focus future Linux Security Module discussions on technical issues. He explained, "it also makes it possible to look at the implementation to see if it has gaps to the intent, without getting into a pissing contest about which security model is better; but unless the security goals are explicitly described that's a trap that will keep coming back... so please spend some time on getting a good description going here.." Arjan continued:

"My main concern for now is a description of what it tries to protect against/in what cases you would expect to use it. THe reason for asking this explicitly is simple: Until now the LSM discussions always ended up in a nasty mixed up mess around disagreeing on the theoretical model of what to protect against and the actual implementation of the threat protection. The only way I can think of to get out of this mess is to have the submitter of the security model give a description of what his protection model is (and unless it's silly, not argue about that), and then only focus on how the code manages to achieve this model, to make sure there's no big gaps in it, within its own goals/reference."

A thread on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list began by discussing whether or not XEN had been ported to OpenBSD, "is it planned at some point to release a paravirtualized xen kernel for OpenBSD 4.3 or 4.4?" Later in the discussion it was suggested that virtualization should be a priority for security reasons, "virtualization seems to have a lot of security benefits." OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt strongly disagreed with this assertion, "you've been smoking something really mind altering, and I think you should share it." He went on to describe virtualization as "something on the shelf, [which] has all sorts of pretty colours, and you've bought it", explaining:

"x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page protection. Then running your operating system on the other side of this brand new pile of shit. You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes."

Later in the thread, Theo went on to note, "if the actual hardware let us do more isolation than we do today, we would actually do it in our operating system. The problem is the hardware DOES NOT actually give us more isolation abilities, therefore the VM does not actually do anything what the say they do." He then suggested that companies marketing virtualization should soften their claims to something supportable, such as, "yes, it [increases] hardware utilization, and the nasty security impact might be low".