Hacker News Reader

And how many of these vulns are in code for legacy hardware or filesystem support that in no way reflects threats against modern Linux installs? I wager the overwhelming majority of them.

View on HN

The recent OpenAI release linked above targeted only ~3M SLoC (out of ~40M), core systems code reachable from within a simple VM guest.

And are those legacy filesystems disabled by default and require root to invoke the code?

On a VM host, only root will be able to mount filesystems or make block-level writes to already-mounted filesystems. So LPE via a filesystem you'd need an exploit that can be triggered by writing to an already mounted filesystem with filesystem operations only as a non-root user.

As I understand it, even commonly-used filesystems aren't considered hardened against arbitrary malicious data, the party line is to use userspace filesystems to mount untrusted volumes.

What about namespaces, if a user creates a user namespace and becomes root inside it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com