Hacker News Reader

Comment by vjerancrnjak | Hacker News Reader

Doesn’t this imply a software design issue where it is just written in a way to have these security bugs and patching them 1 by 1 is not what should be done but the whole design should change which can eliminate full classes of security bugs without any particular patches being necessary?

View on HN

Yes, and we didn't need AI to figure this out. Linux has been averaging ~500 security-relevant bugs per release since at least early 2024, before LLMs got any good at security research: https://social.kernel.org/notice/B9nU6wnmFvh5atXSG8. Now AI has pushed it to ~2000 per release, which is considerably higher, but at this point, does it make a difference?

There are plenty of design decisions that could fundamentally change things. But they're not being taken. What you're seeing is the revealed preference of this system: Security is important, but not enough to make people incur the cost of adopting major changes in pursuing it.

Sort of, but one has to be pragmatic.

Isn't it said that with enough users and use cases, every bug becomes a feature that someone depends on. I'd bet that a lot of these vulnerabilities are the result of intentional trade offs in design.

The only thing I know is that if I wanted to learn how to program, I have thousands of tutorials on the Internet and Youtube teaching everything from if/else to data structures and big O.

But if I wanted to learn software design and architecture, I'd probably not even know where to start.

This is what the Rust advocates have been trying to say for a decade now. But C enthusiasts would always chime in that those bugs were just caused by careless devs and a real C programmer is fine.

A 'real' C programmer probably is fine .... but that's like 1% of the population of developers outputting C programs.

And now you have AI that's learned from the other 99% so nothing's changing anytime soon.

The problem is most drivers believe they are above average drivers.

And almost all of them could be correct.

At least 49.999 percent of them anyway

Are you sure?

I would hope writing C code for the Linux kernel qualifies you as a real C programmer. And yet, here we are. Being good, careful, and extensively reviewed by others helps, but is clearly not enough.

> A 'real' C programmer probably is fine .... but that's like 1% of the population of developers outputting C programs.

The idea that there's a small subset of C programmers who can wrangle the language into obeying them perfectly is obviously, a fantasy.

Rust eliminates some bug classes, but we don't even know yet how many of these vulns would've been prevented by using Rust.

It's also possible that we'd need even more architectural changes to avoid such bugs.

The idea of a microkernel suddenly becomes more appealing...

We have a pretty good idea of this actually, people have been classifying bugs into memory safety issues, etc for a while even pre-AI.

It's worth checking in on the vulns for uutils- lots of stuff! Interacting with the world outside of the compiler has lots of details. No use after frees afaik though.

Yes but even if you swipe the Rust magic wand and somehow reduce the vulnerabilities by 99%, you are still left with 20 critical vulnerabilities per year.

There is something about kernels that make them easy targets and it's not just the language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com