Posted by flipped 17 hours ago
2026-04-29: Submitted detailed information about the rxrpc vulnerability and a weaponized exploit that achieves root privileges on Ubuntu to security@kernel.org.
2026-04-29: Submitted the patch for the rxrpc vulnerability to the netdev mailing list. Information about this issue was published publicly.
2026-05-07: Submitted detailed information about the vulnerability and the exploit to the linux-distros mailing list. The embargo was set to 5 days, with an agreement that if a third party publishes the exploit on the internet during the embargo period, the Dirty Frag exploit would be published publicly.
2026-05-07: Detailed information and the exploit for the esp vulnerability were published publicly by an unrelated third party, breaking the embargo.
2026-05-07: After obtaining agreement from distribution maintainers to fully disclose Dirty Frag, the entire Dirty Frag document was published.
If there's no PoC, how can you really be sure?
But this is very similar to Copy Fail, and I'm assuming there was an assumption that others might also discover this soon as well. Hence the urgency.
At least that's my charitable interpretation.
Monolithic UNIX-like kernels are a bankrupt design.
Only third generation microkernels like seL4[0] make sense in the present world. All effort put elsewhere is wasted outright.
Maybe the more regularly used kernel code has a lot of low-hanging security topics shaken out of it already.
And second, I'm indeed wondering what a good path to minimize the loadable kernel code is on a system looks like. My container hosts for example have a fairly well defined set of requirements, and IPSec certainly is not in there. So why not block everything solely made to support IPSec? I'm sure there is more than that.
After all, the most reliable way to higher security is to do less things.
Transitioning components to rust eliminates certain categories of bugs leaving the rest of the bugs to be dealt with.
We'd likely end up needing another language with stronger type and effect systems to eliminate more categories of bugs. Probably something which enforces linear types, capabilities, units of measure types, and effects.
And you'd have to update linux itself to switch to capabilities.
AI is neat because it's higher signal but yeah no, we're not getting anywhere close to "safe linux", AI or not.