9 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 29.4 ms ] thread
Clever! I know some will say it's like closing the barn door after the horse left, but having this in place to mitigate future vulnerabilities will be handy.
If I'm a malicious actor that gets root, can I killswitch the killswitch?
Better tooling for kpatch would be nice tho

IIRC canonical makes patches for official ubuntu kernels but acts like a Chinese restaurant (closed kitchen, orders come in through a small hatch behind the counter)

Super cool. Also, love reading high quality linux patches. I think many, myself previously included, are afraid to even read the kernel source as one thinks it must be super complex. Of course some parts really are. However, the code is honestly of such high quality. I also highly value that feeling of realizing something once thought 'arcane' was actually only made by other humans, and it is legal to go read it and learn from it.
>Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7
Could something like this also be done via BPF?
What about inlined functions?
this sounds simple, but not running a function doesn't on its own mean safe behavior, if the caller code wasn't written keeping in mind this novel potential refusal as an outcome

still i believe this is the right direction

Is there any library that does this safely for user-mode and is currently used in production ?