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Comment by alhirzel | Hacker News Reader

I am assuming that many of these are found with automatic analysis tools that are very creative (i.e. LLMs) and there may be a high proportion of very "cornered" cases. I think there needs to be a triage method that would amount to the severity, likeliness, and detection dimensions used to rank risks in a systematic framework [1]. I think if this could be submitted (or estimated) along with such bug reports, it could go a long way toward sustainable intake patterns for this number of possible defects.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode_and_effects_analy...

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In my company, the security team isn’t technical. They see CVE, find a vulnerable system, it gets flagged. We have to patch it.

We patched for a CVE last week that a malicious usb sound card device could be use the gain root.

On a Vm? Is that something we really need to worry about??

It's asymmetric warfare. It costs them little to demand a false positive be acted upon, but costs you plenty to refute it.

Its the same at most orgs. Very rare for a vuln remediation program to utilize a truly risk based approach. They would have to trawl through and understand thousands of vulns and the context of your org. There's probably a market for some tool to accomplish this if the larger players haven't attempted already.

They see their dashboard, when the number is high, they want to get the number low as fast as possible. If the number is close to zero, they want to see zero. It is that simple.

They do not care if the issue is in a piece of code that is never executed and would require full access to the machine. It is there and tool X reports it.

Even security audits are terrible, when they don't find anything major they start reporting stuff that few percent of companies have implemented just to stuff their reports, it is ridiculous.

This is the rot that's happening in cybersec. Before we even had security teams as a dedicated role, sysadmins mostly handled security, and we would evaluate each CVE and determined if it even was applicable.

Then companies started hiring paper pushers into security roles and discretion no longer mattered, it just became a game of "Check the box" with no regard for what is actually running in prod, or whether you're actually vulnerable.

Same shit with auditors. I deal with PCI and it's a fight to explain why the "compensating controls" work to a non technical auditor. If it doesn't check the box exactly, good luck.

On a headless VM, almost certainly it's not a worry, since that bug needs a physical port and the driver binding to a plugged-in device (so basically it's never reached). You could even prove it running lsmod showing the module is not loaded (so "not applicable"). Unfortunately the CVSS score doesn't carry reachability information, and not just for the kernel CVEs.

The linux kernel team disagrees with your approach but what do they know?

> Note, due to the layer at which the Linux kernel is in a system, almost any bug might be exploitable to compromise the security of the kernel, but the possibility of exploitation is often not evident when the bug is fixed. Because of this, the CVE assignment team is overly cautious and assign CVE numbers to any bugfix that they identify. This explains the seemingly large number of CVEs that are issued by the Linux kernel team.

That with LLMs being decent at chaining exploits suddenly very difficult issues can be accomplished by people with middling abilities and resources.

I was too busy waxing my armchair and didn't do any reading on the actual practices. Thank you for replying with this. It makes sense. I wonder if this level of purity will survive the test of time; since there are paid kernel developers, the situation could be very different from e.g. an entirely volunteer-maintained project.

I only sampled them, but all the ones I sampled are announcements of fixes, not just vulnerabilities. This seems to be downstream of the "intake" already.

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