A university got itself banned from the Linux kernel (2021)

69 pointsposted 9 hours ago
by italophil
(theverge.com)

45 Comments

paultopia

7 hours ago

Woah, the thing that leapt out at me, as a professor, is that they somehow got an exemption from the UMN institutional review board. Uh, how?? It's clearly human subjects research under the conventional federal definition[1] and obviously posed a meaningful risk of harm, in addition to being conducted deceptively. Someone has to have massively been asleep at the wheel at that IRB.

[1] https://grants.nih.gov/policy-and-compliance/policy-topics/h...

derbOac

6 hours ago

I've also had to deal with the IRB a lot as a professor. The retroactive application is extremely weird (although maybe better than nothing?).

This seems like one of those situations that would usually require regular review to err on the side of caution if nothing else. It's worth pointing out there are exceptions though:

https://grants.nih.gov/sites/default/files/exempt-human-subj...

Generally those exceptions fall into "publicly observable behavior", which I guess I could see this falling into?

It's ethically unjustified how the whole thing actually happened but I guess I can see an IRB coming to an exemption decision. I would probably disagree with that decision but I could see how it would happen.

In some weird legalistic sense I can also see an IRB exempting it because the study already happened and they couldn't do anything about it. It's such a weird thing to do and IRBs do weird things sometimes.

amypetrik214

3 hours ago

>I've also had to deal with the IRB a lot as a professor. The retroactive application is extremely weird (although maybe better than nothing?).

I mean I feel like the IRB is mostly dealing with medical stuff. "I want to electrocute these students every week to see if it cures asthma". "No that's too much.. every other week at most". "Great I'll charge up the electrodes"

So if a security researcher rolls in after the fact and says "umm yea so this has to do with nerd stuff, computers and kernels, no humans, and I just want it all to be super secure and nobody gets hacked, sound good" "ok sure we don't care if no people are involved and don't really understand that nerd stuff, but hackers bad and you're fighting hackers"

tptacek

7 hours ago

The whole story is a good example of why there are IRBs in the first place --- in any story not about this Linux kernel fiasco people generally cast them as the bad guys.

NetMageSCW

3 hours ago

Since this IRB approved the study, what good were they?

margalabargala

an hour ago

That person died in a car accident and they were wearing a seatbelt! Why would anyone wear a seatbelt? They are clearly useless.

stinkbeetle

an hour ago

That seems like a bad faith reinterpretation of the context that the question was being asked in. The statement that the question pertained to was, "in any story not about this Linux kernel fiasco people generally cast them as the bad guys."

Consultant32452

an hour ago

If a lot of money is involved, it's only a matter of time before all oversight is corrupt. Similarly, you can safely assume all data that is on an important (big money) topic is fake.

something765478

6 hours ago

I think they should have gotten permission from IRB ahead of time, but this doesn't sound like they were researching human subjects? They were studying the community behind the Linux kernel, and specifically the process for gatekeeping bad changes from making it to the kernel; they weren't experimenting on specific community members. Would you consider it human experimentation if I was running an experiment to see if I could get crappy products listed on Amazon, for example?

fwip

3 minutes ago

A community is made out of humans.

firefax

6 hours ago

>I think they should have gotten permission from IRB ahead of time, but this doesn't sound like they were researching human subjects?

I assure you that it falls under IRB's purview -- I came into the thread intending to make grandparent's comment. When using deception in a human subjects experiment, there is an additional level of rigor -- you usually need to debrief the participant about said deception, not wait for them to read about it in the press.

(And if a human is reviewing these patches, then yes, it is human subjects research.)

dessimus

6 hours ago

> Would you consider it human experimentation if I was running an experiment to see if I could get crappy products listed on Amazon, for example?

Yes, if in the course of that experimentation, you also shipped potentially harmful products to buyers of those products "to see if Amazon actually let me".

nearlyepic

6 hours ago

> they weren't experimenting on specific community members.

Yes, they were. What kind of argument is this? If you submit a PR to the kernel you are explicitly engaging with the maintainer(s) of that part of the kernel. That's usually not more than half a dozen people. Seems pretty specific to me.

samgranieri

4 hours ago

This is retroactive ass covering by the UMN IRB.

lawejrj

6 hours ago

Maybe you're over-estimating how much universities actually care about ethics and IRB.

I reported my advisor to university admin for gross safety violations, attempting to collect data on human subjects without any IRB oversight at all, falsifying data, and falsifying financial records. He brought his undergrad class into the lab one day and said we should collect data on them, (low hanging fruit!) with machinery that had just started working a few days prior, we hadn't even begun developing basic safety features for it, we hadn't even discussed design of experiments or requesting IRB approval for experiments. We (grad students) cornered the professor as a group and told him that was wildly unacceptable, and he tried it multiple more times before we reported him to university admin. Admin ignored it completely. In the next year, we also reported him for falsifying data in journal papers and falsifying financial records related to research grants. And, oh yeah, assigning Chinese nationals to work on DoD-funded work that explicitly required US citizens and lying to the DoD about it. University completely ignored that too. And then he got tenure. I was in a Top-10-US grad program. So in my experience, as long as the endowment is growing, university admin doesn't care about much else.

arjie

7 hours ago

The ultimate problem is that it's easy to fake stuff so you have to use heuristics to see who you can trust. You sort of sum up your threat score and then decide how much attention to apply. Without doing something like that, the transaction costs dominate and certain valuable things can't be done. It's true that Western universities are generally a positive component to that score and students under a professor there are another positive component to the score.

It's like if my wife said "I'm taking the car to get it washed" and then she actually takes the car to the junkyard and sells it. "Ha, you got fooled!". I mean, yes, obviously. She's on the inside of my trust boundary and I don't want to live a life where I'm actually operating in a way immune to this 'exploit'.

I get that others object to the human experimentation part of things and so on, but for me that could be justified with a sufficiently high bar of utility. The problem is that this research is useless.

jovial_cavalier

7 hours ago

No, random anonymous contributors with cheng3920845823@gmail.com as their email address are not as trustworthy as your wife, and blindly merging PRs from them into some of the most security-critical and widely used code in the entire world without so much as running a static analyzer is not reasonable.

arjie

7 hours ago

Oh I misunderstood the sections in the article about the umn.edu email stuff. My mistake. The actual course of events:

1. Prof and students make fake identities

2. They submit these secret vulns to Greg KH and friends

3. Some of these patches are accepted

4. They intervene at this point and reveal that the patches are malicious

5. The patches are then not merged

6. This news comes out and Greg KH applies big negative trust score to umn.edu

7. Some other student submits a buggy patch to Greg KH

8. Greg KH assumes that it is more research like this

9. Student calls it slander

10. Greg KH institutes policy for his tree that all umn.edu patches should be auto-rejected and begins reverts for all patches submitted in the past by such emails

To be honest, I can't imagine any other such outcome could have occurred. No one likes being cheated out of work that they did, especially when a lot of it is volunteer work. But I was wrong to say the research was useless. It does demonstrate that identities without provenance can get malicious code into the kernel.

Perhaps what we really need is a Social Credit Score for OSS ;)

caycep

7 hours ago

Actually, I think #7 is one of the same students working for the professor. So GKH is correct in assuming it's more of the same.

Research can be non-useless but also unethical at the same time...

yjftsjthsd-h

7 hours ago

> 3. Some of these patches are accepted

> 4. They intervene at this point and reveal that the patches are malicious

> 5. The patches are then not merged

It's not clear to me that they revealed anything, just that they did fix the problems:

> In their paper, Lu and Wu claimed that none of their bugs had actually made it to the Linux kernel — in all of their test cases, they’d eventually pulled their bad patches and provided real ones. Kroah-Hartman, of the Linux Foundation, contests this — he told The Verge that one patch from the study did make it into repositories, though he notes it didn’t end up causing any harm.

(I'm only working from this article, though, so feel free to correct me)

arjie

6 hours ago

You know there's a lot of he-said she-said here. The truth is that I was repeating there what they claimed in the paper which is that they intervened prior to merge to mainline.

yjftsjthsd-h

6 hours ago

My point was that (the article claims that) they didn't "reveal that the patches are malicious" at that point. Revert yes, reveal no.

arjie

5 hours ago

Man, what a mess.

jovial_cavalier

6 hours ago

I don't believe they revealed that they were hypocrite commits at the time of their acceptance, that was only revealed when the paper was put on a preprint server. But they did point out the problems to maintainers before the changes were mainlined.

jovial_cavalier

6 hours ago

>No one likes being cheated out of work that they did, especially when a lot of it is volunteer work.

You know what would really be wasteful of volunteer hours? Instituting a policy whereby the community has to trawl through 20 years of commits from umn.edu addresses and manually review them for vulnerabilities even though you have no reasonable expectation that such commits are likely to contain malicious code and you're actually just butthurt. (they found nothing after weeks of doing this btw)

dessimus

6 hours ago

But what if the next paper is about then about the bad patch they put in 15 years ago and it still hasn't been noticed? UMN has created a situation that now calls into question everything that has contributed by UMN in showing bad-faith in retroactively approving Lu's actions.

yjftsjthsd-h

5 hours ago

> even though you have no reasonable expectation that such commits are likely to contain malicious code and you're actually just butthurt

Other than the tiny bit where that's not true. An institution just demonstrated that they are willing to submit malicious code, and don't feel any need to tell you that they did so (even after the fact). It's perfectly reasonable to ask if they've done this before.

gnabgib

9 hours ago

(2021) Discussion at the time (3025 points, 1954 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670

gweinberg

5 hours ago

Yeah, given that it's been 5 years I would think there would be some followup.

jovial_cavalier

7 hours ago

The authors were 100% in the right, and GKH was 100% in the wrong. It's very amusing to go back and read all of the commenters calling for the paper authors to face criminal prosecution. The fact is that they provided a valuable service and exposed a genuine issue with kernel development policies. Their work reflected poorly on kernel maintainers, and so those maintainers threw a hissy fit and brigaded the community against them.

Also, banning umn.edu email addresses didn't even make sense since the hypocrite commits were all from gmail addresses.

yjftsjthsd-h

7 hours ago

> Also, banning umn.edu email addresses didn't even make sense since the hypocrite commits were all from gmail addresses.

The blanket ban was kicked off by another incident after the hypocrite commit incident.

caycep

7 hours ago

I mean...there is a whole discussion about the questionable ethics of the research methods in the verge article. And human subjects and issues-of-consent questions aside, they are also messing with a mission critical system (linux kernel), and apparently left crappy code in there for all the maintainers to go back and weed out.

jovial_cavalier

6 hours ago

1) once hypocrite commits were accepted, the authors would immediately retract them

2) I don't think it's unethical to send someone an email that has bad code in it. You shouldn't need an IRB to send emails.

wtallis

6 hours ago

> I don't think it's unethical to send someone an email that has bad code in it.

It's unethical because of the bits you left out: sending code you know is bad, and doing so under false pretenses.

Whether or not you think this rises to the level of requiring IRB approval, surely you must be able to understand that wasting people's time like this is going to be viewed negatively by almost anyone. Some people might be willing to accept that doing this harm is worth it for the greater cause of the research, but that doesn't erase the harm done.

9cb14c1ec0

6 hours ago

The stupid thing about the experiment was that it's never been a secret that the kernel is vulnerable to malicious patches. The kernel community understood this long before these academics wasted kernel maintainer time with a silly experiment.

letmetweakit

8 hours ago

Imo, the experiment was worthwhile, it exposed a risk, hopefully the kernel is better armed against similar attacks now.

knowitnone3

4 hours ago

They retaliated against the entire university. I don't think they learned anything.

firefax

6 hours ago

>Then, there’s the dicier issue of whether an experiment like this amounts to human experimentation. It doesn’t, according to the University of Minnesota’s Institutional Review Board. Lu and Wu applied for approval in response to the outcry, and they were granted a formal letter of exemption.

I had to apply for exemptions often in grad school. You must do so before performing the research -- it is not ethical to wait for outcry then apply after the fact. Any well run CS department trains it's incoming students on IRB procedures during orientation, and Minnesota risks all federal funding if they continue to allow researchers to operate in this manner.

(Also "exempt" usually refers to exempt from the more rigorous level of review used for medical experiments -- you still need to articulate why your experiment is exempt to avoid people just doing whatever they want then asking for forgiveness after the fact)

samgranieri

4 hours ago

I was honestly surprised the University of Minnesota didn’t part ways with the teacher and students who performed this bullshit research.

This level of malfeasance strikes me as something akin to plagiarism for a professional writer.

something765478

6 hours ago

While I did see some problems with their approach (i.e. doing the IRB reviews retroactively instead of doing them ahead of time, and not properly disclosing the experiments afterwards), I think this research is valuable, and I don't think the authors were too unethical. The event that this most reminds me of the Sokal Squared scandal, where researchers sent bogus papers to journals in order to test those journal's peer review standards.

jmclnx

7 hours ago

Did they ever get un-banned ? IIRC, that Univ has/had great Computer Science Dept.

But there is always the BSDs.

cmxch

2 hours ago

a/b testing the insertion of vulnerable code is not a good idea.