Woah, the thing that leapt out at me, as a professor, is that they somehow got an exemption from the UMN institutional review board. Uh, how?? It's clearly human subjects research under the conventional federal definition[1] and obviously posed a meaningful risk of harm, in addition to being conducted deceptively. Someone has to have massively been asleep at the wheel at that IRB.
I've also had to deal with the IRB a lot as a professor. The retroactive application is extremely weird (although maybe better than nothing?).
This seems like one of those situations that would usually require regular review to err on the side of caution if nothing else. It's worth pointing out there are exceptions though:
Generally those exceptions fall into "publicly observable behavior", which I guess I could see this falling into?
It's ethically unjustified how the whole thing actually happened but I guess I can see an IRB coming to an exemption decision. I would probably disagree with that decision but I could see how it would happen.
In some weird legalistic sense I can also see an IRB exempting it because the study already happened and they couldn't do anything about it. It's such a weird thing to do and IRBs do weird things sometimes.
>I've also had to deal with the IRB a lot as a professor. The retroactive application is extremely weird (although maybe better than nothing?).
I mean I feel like the IRB is mostly dealing with medical stuff. "I want to electrocute these students every week to see if it cures asthma". "No that's too much.. every other week at most". "Great I'll charge up the electrodes"
So if a security researcher rolls in after the fact and says "umm yea so this has to do with nerd stuff, computers and kernels, no humans, and I just want it all to be super secure and nobody gets hacked, sound good" "ok sure we don't care if no people are involved and don't really understand that nerd stuff, but hackers bad and you're fighting hackers"
The whole story is a good example of why there are IRBs in the first place --- in any story not about this Linux kernel fiasco people generally cast them as the bad guys.
> That person died in a car accident and they were wearing a seatbelt! But in any story not about this car accident people generally cast them as the useless.
This story isn't evidence that IRBs are always useless, but also it's not an example of them being useful. The thing this story shows is they are sometimes useless.
That seems like a bad faith reinterpretation of the context that the question was being asked in. The statement that the question pertained to was, "in any story not about this Linux kernel fiasco people generally cast them as the bad guys."
If a lot of money is involved, it's only a matter of time before all oversight is corrupt. Similarly, you can safely assume all data that is on an important (big money) topic is fake.
> Woah, the thing that leapt out at me, as a professor, is that they somehow got an exemption from the UMN institutional review board. .... in addition to being conducted deceptively
There are cases where deception (as they call it) can be approved (even by ethics boards). Based on the Verge's article, this research setup should not have been approved even by then. But the topic itself seems as relevant as ever with the xz case and all.
Right, that's something to discuss at the IRB review. But they didn't even do an IRB review before conducting the experiment. After the outcry, they went back to the IRB and said "was this OK?"
I think they should have gotten permission from IRB ahead of time, but this doesn't sound like they were researching human subjects? They were studying the community behind the Linux kernel, and specifically the process for gatekeeping bad changes from making it to the kernel; they weren't experimenting on specific community members. Would you consider it human experimentation if I was running an experiment to see if I could get crappy products listed on Amazon, for example?
> they weren't experimenting on specific community members.
Yes, they were. What kind of argument is this? If you submit a PR to the kernel you are explicitly engaging with the maintainer(s) of that part of the kernel. That's usually not more than half a dozen people. Seems pretty specific to me.
>I think they should have gotten permission from IRB ahead of time, but this doesn't sound like they were researching human subjects?
I assure you that it falls under IRB's purview -- I came into the thread intending to make grandparent's comment. When using deception in a human subjects experiment, there is an additional level of rigor -- you usually need to debrief the participant about said deception, not wait for them to read about it in the press.
(And if a human is reviewing these patches, then yes, it is human subjects research.)
> Would you consider it human experimentation if I was running an experiment to see if I could get crappy products listed on Amazon, for example?
Yes, if in the course of that experimentation, you also shipped potentially harmful products to buyers of those products "to see if Amazon actually let me".
Maybe you're over-estimating how much universities actually care about ethics and IRB.
I reported my advisor to university admin for gross safety violations, attempting to collect data on human subjects without any IRB oversight at all, falsifying data, and falsifying financial records. He brought his undergrad class into the lab one day and said we should collect data on them, (low hanging fruit!) with machinery that had just started working a few days prior, we hadn't even begun developing basic safety features for it, we hadn't even discussed design of experiments or requesting IRB approval for experiments. We (grad students) cornered the professor as a group and told him that was wildly unacceptable, and he tried it multiple more times before we reported him to university admin. Admin ignored it completely. In the next year, we also reported him for falsifying data in journal papers and falsifying financial records related to research grants. And, oh yeah, assigning Chinese nationals to work on DoD-funded work that explicitly required US citizens and lying to the DoD about it. University completely ignored that too. And then he got tenure. I was in a Top-10-US grad program. So in my experience, as long as the endowment is growing, university admin doesn't care about much else.
The ultimate problem is that it's easy to fake stuff so you have to use heuristics to see who you can trust. You sort of sum up your threat score and then decide how much attention to apply. Without doing something like that, the transaction costs dominate and certain valuable things can't be done. It's true that Western universities are generally a positive component to that score and students under a professor there are another positive component to the score.
It's like if my wife said "I'm taking the car to get it washed" and then she actually takes the car to the junkyard and sells it. "Ha, you got fooled!". I mean, yes, obviously. She's on the inside of my trust boundary and I don't want to live a life where I'm actually operating in a way immune to this 'exploit'.
I get that others object to the human experimentation part of things and so on, but for me that could be justified with a sufficiently high bar of utility. The problem is that this research is useless.
No, random anonymous contributors with cheng3920845823@gmail.com as their email address are not as trustworthy as your wife, and blindly merging PRs from them into some of the most security-critical and widely used code in the entire world without so much as running a static analyzer is not reasonable.
Oh I misunderstood the sections in the article about the umn.edu email stuff. My mistake. The actual course of events:
1. Prof and students make fake identities
2. They submit these secret vulns to Greg KH and friends
3. Some of these patches are accepted
4. They intervene at this point and reveal that the patches are malicious
5. The patches are then not merged
6. This news comes out and Greg KH applies big negative trust score to umn.edu
7. Some other student submits a buggy patch to Greg KH
8. Greg KH assumes that it is more research like this
9. Student calls it slander
10. Greg KH institutes policy for his tree that all umn.edu patches should be auto-rejected and begins reverts for all patches submitted in the past by such emails
To be honest, I can't imagine any other such outcome could have occurred. No one likes being cheated out of work that they did, especially when a lot of it is volunteer work. But I was wrong to say the research was useless. It does demonstrate that identities without provenance can get malicious code into the kernel.
Perhaps what we really need is a Social Credit Score for OSS ;)
> 4. They intervene at this point and reveal that the patches are malicious
> 5. The patches are then not merged
It's not clear to me that they revealed anything, just that they did fix the problems:
> In their paper, Lu and Wu claimed that none of their bugs had actually made it to the Linux kernel — in all of their test cases, they’d eventually pulled their bad patches and provided real ones. Kroah-Hartman, of the Linux Foundation, contests this — he told The Verge that one patch from the study did make it into repositories, though he notes it didn’t end up causing any harm.
(I'm only working from this article, though, so feel free to correct me)
I don't believe they revealed that they were hypocrite commits at the time of their acceptance, that was only revealed when the paper was put on a preprint server. But they did point out the problems to maintainers before the changes were mainlined.
You know there's a lot of he-said she-said here. The truth is that I was repeating there what they claimed in the paper which is that they intervened prior to merge to mainline.
IIRC one of them actually introduced a memory corrupting problem. I don't know if it got accepted or not. I remember seeing the issue and rejecting the patch for rhel.
>No one likes being cheated out of work that they did, especially when a lot of it is volunteer work.
You know what would really be wasteful of volunteer hours? Instituting a policy whereby the community has to trawl through 20 years of commits from umn.edu addresses and manually review them for vulnerabilities even though you have no reasonable expectation that such commits are likely to contain malicious code and you're actually just butthurt. (they found nothing after weeks of doing this btw)
But what if the next paper is about then about the bad patch they put in 15 years ago and it still hasn't been noticed? UMN has created a situation that now calls into question everything that has contributed by UMN in showing bad-faith in retroactively approving Lu's actions.
That professor just destroyed the ability to trust public institutions like universities to not be malicious actors. You can't restore that trust unless you comb through everything. If you just let them go, you now have to distrust every single university by default, which is even more expensive.
> even though you have no reasonable expectation that such commits are likely to contain malicious code and you're actually just butthurt
Other than the tiny bit where that's not true.
An institution just demonstrated that they are willing to submit malicious code, and don't feel any need to tell you that they did so (even after the fact). It's perfectly reasonable to ask if they've done this before.
The authors were 100% in the right, and GKH was 100% in the wrong. It's very amusing to go back and read all of the commenters calling for the paper authors to face criminal prosecution. The fact is that they provided a valuable service and exposed a genuine issue with kernel development policies. Their work reflected poorly on kernel maintainers, and so those maintainers threw a hissy fit and brigaded the community against them.
Also, banning umn.edu email addresses didn't even make sense since the hypocrite commits were all from gmail addresses.
I mean...there is a whole discussion about the questionable ethics of the research methods in the verge article. And human subjects and issues-of-consent questions aside, they are also messing with a mission critical system (linux kernel), and apparently left crappy code in there for all the maintainers to go back and weed out.
> I don't think it's unethical to send someone an email that has bad code in it.
It's unethical because of the bits you left out: sending code you know is bad, and doing so under false pretenses.
Whether or not you think this rises to the level of requiring IRB approval, surely you must be able to understand that wasting people's time like this is going to be viewed negatively by almost anyone. Some people might be willing to accept that doing this harm is worth it for the greater cause of the research, but that doesn't erase the harm done.
See another comment I made in this thread about GKH's response - the UMN group submitted a handful of small patches as part of this study, and "wasted" probably a handful of man hours or at worst a few man days of maintainer time. I don't really consider it a waste because evidence that critical open source infrastructure doesn't bother to run static analysis before merging code from randos is actually useful information that the public deserves to have.
GKH's response was to waste man weeks or man months of maintainer time persecuting every last commit that happened to come from umn.edu, despite having zero reason to believe these commits were more suspect than any other institution's commits.
> evidence that critical open source infrastructure doesn't bother to run static analysis before merging code from randos is actually useful information that the public deserves to have.
It's totally possible to obtain evidence of that without being an asshole to kernel maintainers. Which is the kind of thing that an ethics review conducted before the experiment could have pointed out. If the goal of the experiment was merely to demonstrate the lack of routine static analysis capable of catching such vulnerabilities, then the experiment's design was not justified and the experiment was needlessly harmful to non-consenting participants.
2) Yes, emails absolutely need IRB sign-off too. If you email a bunch of people asking for their health info or doing a survey, the IRB would smack you for unapproved human research without consent. Consent was obviously not given here.
1) They did not hit stable. GKH is referring, in this email, to a legitimate attempt to contribute from a student at UMN. Whether or not this student was part of the hypocrite commits study, I don't know. But it's not a hypocrite commit, just a normal buggy commit. You can tell, because it's from a umn.edu email address, which they did not use for hypocrite commits.
2) I don't actually care about the internal policies of UMN's IRB. Whether or not the study's approval was proper and whether they would get into trouble with their boss is not my problem. The point is that what they did is obviously not immoral or unethical.
The point of an IRB is to act as an outside reviewer of _ethics_. IRBs aren't some checklist thing admin put in to protect the University's reputation, they exist as a direct reaction to huge amounts of unethical human experimentation occurring last century.
The point of an IRB is to stop you from nonconsentually sterilizing people. As long as the system stops that from happening, I don't care about the paperwork. It's not my concern.
The "ethical" issues with this study do not rise to the level that I care, so the only objection is that they didn't get the IRB to rubber stamp it beforehand, which I also don't care about.
The stupid thing about the experiment was that it's never been a secret that the kernel is vulnerable to malicious patches. The kernel community understood this long before these academics wasted kernel maintainer time with a silly experiment.
Agree, to me this "research" is like proving grocery stores are vulnerable to theft by sending students to shoplift. If review process guaranteed that vulnerabilities can't pass, wouldn't that mean that the current kernel should be pristinely devoid of them?
I believe most people believe that the Linux kernel couldn’t be compromised because there is multiple approval process and highly professional people vetoing.
It seems like a big vulnerability, if a teacher assistant could do that, there is no doubt that government agencies can too.
>Then, there’s the dicier issue of whether an experiment like this amounts to human experimentation. It doesn’t, according to the University of Minnesota’s Institutional Review Board. Lu and Wu applied for approval in response to the outcry, and they were granted a formal letter of exemption.
I had to apply for exemptions often in grad school. You must do so before performing the research -- it is not ethical to wait for outcry then apply after the fact. Any well run CS department trains it's incoming students on IRB procedures during orientation, and Minnesota risks all federal funding if they continue to allow researchers to operate in this manner.
(Also "exempt" usually refers to exempt from the more rigorous level of review used for medical experiments -- you still need to articulate why your experiment is exempt to avoid people just doing whatever they want then asking for forgiveness after the fact)
What's the alternative to banning bad actors? Making Linux maintainers take every spam commit 100% seriously as if it was legitimate? All that would bring about is that the second "research project" would be about spamming commits to the Linux kernel to DDOS the maintainers.
Pretty ridiculous. If I send them an email with a stupid question wasting their time on purpose just to see if they'll reply is that "human experimentation"? What a loose definition.
More to the point; are they salty because the author has possibly proved that it's most certainly possible to get critical flaws into the Linux kernel with social engineering? How else is something like that meant to be tested?
If you give them a heads-up they'll pay more attention for a short duration of time.
While I did see some problems with their approach (i.e. doing the IRB reviews retroactively instead of doing them ahead of time, and not properly disclosing the experiments afterwards), I think this research is valuable, and I don't think the authors were too unethical. The event that this most reminds me of the Sokal Squared scandal, where researchers sent bogus papers to journals in order to test those journal's peer review standards.
> If a sufficiently motivated, unscrupulous person can put themselves into a trusted position of updating critical software, there’s honestly little that can be done to stop them,” says White, the security researcher.
thats literally like 90% of anything. This is open source, code maintained in large swaths by volunteers. Obviously there is not extensive background checks that are being done, the amount of resources that would require is not something the Linux Foundation probably has.
Woah, the thing that leapt out at me, as a professor, is that they somehow got an exemption from the UMN institutional review board. Uh, how?? It's clearly human subjects research under the conventional federal definition[1] and obviously posed a meaningful risk of harm, in addition to being conducted deceptively. Someone has to have massively been asleep at the wheel at that IRB.
[1] https://grants.nih.gov/policy-and-compliance/policy-topics/h...
I've also had to deal with the IRB a lot as a professor. The retroactive application is extremely weird (although maybe better than nothing?).
This seems like one of those situations that would usually require regular review to err on the side of caution if nothing else. It's worth pointing out there are exceptions though:
https://grants.nih.gov/sites/default/files/exempt-human-subj...
Generally those exceptions fall into "publicly observable behavior", which I guess I could see this falling into?
It's ethically unjustified how the whole thing actually happened but I guess I can see an IRB coming to an exemption decision. I would probably disagree with that decision but I could see how it would happen.
In some weird legalistic sense I can also see an IRB exempting it because the study already happened and they couldn't do anything about it. It's such a weird thing to do and IRBs do weird things sometimes.
>I've also had to deal with the IRB a lot as a professor. The retroactive application is extremely weird (although maybe better than nothing?).
I mean I feel like the IRB is mostly dealing with medical stuff. "I want to electrocute these students every week to see if it cures asthma". "No that's too much.. every other week at most". "Great I'll charge up the electrodes"
So if a security researcher rolls in after the fact and says "umm yea so this has to do with nerd stuff, computers and kernels, no humans, and I just want it all to be super secure and nobody gets hacked, sound good" "ok sure we don't care if no people are involved and don't really understand that nerd stuff, but hackers bad and you're fighting hackers"
Any undergrad doing a survey at my university has to get IRB approval.
I can see the irb giving retroactive approval solely because of political pressure. Which is why legitimate studies seek approval in advance.
The whole story is a good example of why there are IRBs in the first place --- in any story not about this Linux kernel fiasco people generally cast them as the bad guys.
Since this IRB approved the study, what good were they?
That person died in a car accident and they were wearing a seatbelt! Why would anyone wear a seatbelt? They are clearly useless.
> That person died in a car accident and they were wearing a seatbelt! But in any story not about this car accident people generally cast them as the useless.
This story isn't evidence that IRBs are always useless, but also it's not an example of them being useful. The thing this story shows is they are sometimes useless.
Yeah, that's reasonable.
That seems like a bad faith reinterpretation of the context that the question was being asked in. The statement that the question pertained to was, "in any story not about this Linux kernel fiasco people generally cast them as the bad guys."
If a lot of money is involved, it's only a matter of time before all oversight is corrupt. Similarly, you can safely assume all data that is on an important (big money) topic is fake.
But a lot of money was not involved here.
> Woah, the thing that leapt out at me, as a professor, is that they somehow got an exemption from the UMN institutional review board. .... in addition to being conducted deceptively
There are cases where deception (as they call it) can be approved (even by ethics boards). Based on the Verge's article, this research setup should not have been approved even by then. But the topic itself seems as relevant as ever with the xz case and all.
Right, that's something to discuss at the IRB review. But they didn't even do an IRB review before conducting the experiment. After the outcry, they went back to the IRB and said "was this OK?"
I think they should have gotten permission from IRB ahead of time, but this doesn't sound like they were researching human subjects? They were studying the community behind the Linux kernel, and specifically the process for gatekeeping bad changes from making it to the kernel; they weren't experimenting on specific community members. Would you consider it human experimentation if I was running an experiment to see if I could get crappy products listed on Amazon, for example?
> they weren't experimenting on specific community members.
Yes, they were. What kind of argument is this? If you submit a PR to the kernel you are explicitly engaging with the maintainer(s) of that part of the kernel. That's usually not more than half a dozen people. Seems pretty specific to me.
>I think they should have gotten permission from IRB ahead of time, but this doesn't sound like they were researching human subjects?
I assure you that it falls under IRB's purview -- I came into the thread intending to make grandparent's comment. When using deception in a human subjects experiment, there is an additional level of rigor -- you usually need to debrief the participant about said deception, not wait for them to read about it in the press.
(And if a human is reviewing these patches, then yes, it is human subjects research.)
> Would you consider it human experimentation if I was running an experiment to see if I could get crappy products listed on Amazon, for example?
Yes, if in the course of that experimentation, you also shipped potentially harmful products to buyers of those products "to see if Amazon actually let me".
A community is made out of humans.
Maybe you're over-estimating how much universities actually care about ethics and IRB.
I reported my advisor to university admin for gross safety violations, attempting to collect data on human subjects without any IRB oversight at all, falsifying data, and falsifying financial records. He brought his undergrad class into the lab one day and said we should collect data on them, (low hanging fruit!) with machinery that had just started working a few days prior, we hadn't even begun developing basic safety features for it, we hadn't even discussed design of experiments or requesting IRB approval for experiments. We (grad students) cornered the professor as a group and told him that was wildly unacceptable, and he tried it multiple more times before we reported him to university admin. Admin ignored it completely. In the next year, we also reported him for falsifying data in journal papers and falsifying financial records related to research grants. And, oh yeah, assigning Chinese nationals to work on DoD-funded work that explicitly required US citizens and lying to the DoD about it. University completely ignored that too. And then he got tenure. I was in a Top-10-US grad program. So in my experience, as long as the endowment is growing, university admin doesn't care about much else.
This is retroactive ass covering by the UMN IRB.
A reteroactive exception!
Don't worry, the university investigated itself (again) and (again) found no wrongdoing. /s
The ultimate problem is that it's easy to fake stuff so you have to use heuristics to see who you can trust. You sort of sum up your threat score and then decide how much attention to apply. Without doing something like that, the transaction costs dominate and certain valuable things can't be done. It's true that Western universities are generally a positive component to that score and students under a professor there are another positive component to the score.
It's like if my wife said "I'm taking the car to get it washed" and then she actually takes the car to the junkyard and sells it. "Ha, you got fooled!". I mean, yes, obviously. She's on the inside of my trust boundary and I don't want to live a life where I'm actually operating in a way immune to this 'exploit'.
I get that others object to the human experimentation part of things and so on, but for me that could be justified with a sufficiently high bar of utility. The problem is that this research is useless.
No, random anonymous contributors with cheng3920845823@gmail.com as their email address are not as trustworthy as your wife, and blindly merging PRs from them into some of the most security-critical and widely used code in the entire world without so much as running a static analyzer is not reasonable.
Oh I misunderstood the sections in the article about the umn.edu email stuff. My mistake. The actual course of events:
1. Prof and students make fake identities
2. They submit these secret vulns to Greg KH and friends
3. Some of these patches are accepted
4. They intervene at this point and reveal that the patches are malicious
5. The patches are then not merged
6. This news comes out and Greg KH applies big negative trust score to umn.edu
7. Some other student submits a buggy patch to Greg KH
8. Greg KH assumes that it is more research like this
9. Student calls it slander
10. Greg KH institutes policy for his tree that all umn.edu patches should be auto-rejected and begins reverts for all patches submitted in the past by such emails
To be honest, I can't imagine any other such outcome could have occurred. No one likes being cheated out of work that they did, especially when a lot of it is volunteer work. But I was wrong to say the research was useless. It does demonstrate that identities without provenance can get malicious code into the kernel.
Perhaps what we really need is a Social Credit Score for OSS ;)
Actually, I think #7 is one of the same students working for the professor. So GKH is correct in assuming it's more of the same.
Research can be non-useless but also unethical at the same time...
> 3. Some of these patches are accepted
> 4. They intervene at this point and reveal that the patches are malicious
> 5. The patches are then not merged
It's not clear to me that they revealed anything, just that they did fix the problems:
> In their paper, Lu and Wu claimed that none of their bugs had actually made it to the Linux kernel — in all of their test cases, they’d eventually pulled their bad patches and provided real ones. Kroah-Hartman, of the Linux Foundation, contests this — he told The Verge that one patch from the study did make it into repositories, though he notes it didn’t end up causing any harm.
(I'm only working from this article, though, so feel free to correct me)
I don't believe they revealed that they were hypocrite commits at the time of their acceptance, that was only revealed when the paper was put on a preprint server. But they did point out the problems to maintainers before the changes were mainlined.
You know there's a lot of he-said she-said here. The truth is that I was repeating there what they claimed in the paper which is that they intervened prior to merge to mainline.
My point was that (the article claims that) they didn't "reveal that the patches are malicious" at that point. Revert yes, reveal no.
IIRC one of them actually introduced a memory corrupting problem. I don't know if it got accepted or not. I remember seeing the issue and rejecting the patch for rhel.
Man, what a mess.
>No one likes being cheated out of work that they did, especially when a lot of it is volunteer work.
You know what would really be wasteful of volunteer hours? Instituting a policy whereby the community has to trawl through 20 years of commits from umn.edu addresses and manually review them for vulnerabilities even though you have no reasonable expectation that such commits are likely to contain malicious code and you're actually just butthurt. (they found nothing after weeks of doing this btw)
But what if the next paper is about then about the bad patch they put in 15 years ago and it still hasn't been noticed? UMN has created a situation that now calls into question everything that has contributed by UMN in showing bad-faith in retroactively approving Lu's actions.
That professor just destroyed the ability to trust public institutions like universities to not be malicious actors. You can't restore that trust unless you comb through everything. If you just let them go, you now have to distrust every single university by default, which is even more expensive.
> even though you have no reasonable expectation that such commits are likely to contain malicious code and you're actually just butthurt
Other than the tiny bit where that's not true. An institution just demonstrated that they are willing to submit malicious code, and don't feel any need to tell you that they did so (even after the fact). It's perfectly reasonable to ask if they've done this before.
(2021) Discussion at the time (3025 points, 1954 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670
Fun fact: one of the researchers removed any reference to this from their publications page: https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~kjlu/
Yeah, given that it's been 5 years I would think there would be some followup.
The authors were 100% in the right, and GKH was 100% in the wrong. It's very amusing to go back and read all of the commenters calling for the paper authors to face criminal prosecution. The fact is that they provided a valuable service and exposed a genuine issue with kernel development policies. Their work reflected poorly on kernel maintainers, and so those maintainers threw a hissy fit and brigaded the community against them.
Also, banning umn.edu email addresses didn't even make sense since the hypocrite commits were all from gmail addresses.
> Also, banning umn.edu email addresses didn't even make sense since the hypocrite commits were all from gmail addresses.
The blanket ban was kicked off by another incident after the hypocrite commit incident.
I mean...there is a whole discussion about the questionable ethics of the research methods in the verge article. And human subjects and issues-of-consent questions aside, they are also messing with a mission critical system (linux kernel), and apparently left crappy code in there for all the maintainers to go back and weed out.
1) once hypocrite commits were accepted, the authors would immediately retract them
2) I don't think it's unethical to send someone an email that has bad code in it. You shouldn't need an IRB to send emails.
> I don't think it's unethical to send someone an email that has bad code in it.
It's unethical because of the bits you left out: sending code you know is bad, and doing so under false pretenses.
Whether or not you think this rises to the level of requiring IRB approval, surely you must be able to understand that wasting people's time like this is going to be viewed negatively by almost anyone. Some people might be willing to accept that doing this harm is worth it for the greater cause of the research, but that doesn't erase the harm done.
See another comment I made in this thread about GKH's response - the UMN group submitted a handful of small patches as part of this study, and "wasted" probably a handful of man hours or at worst a few man days of maintainer time. I don't really consider it a waste because evidence that critical open source infrastructure doesn't bother to run static analysis before merging code from randos is actually useful information that the public deserves to have.
GKH's response was to waste man weeks or man months of maintainer time persecuting every last commit that happened to come from umn.edu, despite having zero reason to believe these commits were more suspect than any other institution's commits.
> evidence that critical open source infrastructure doesn't bother to run static analysis before merging code from randos is actually useful information that the public deserves to have.
It's totally possible to obtain evidence of that without being an asshole to kernel maintainers. Which is the kind of thing that an ethics review conducted before the experiment could have pointed out. If the goal of the experiment was merely to demonstrate the lack of routine static analysis capable of catching such vulnerabilities, then the experiment's design was not justified and the experiment was needlessly harmful to non-consenting participants.
Bad code is wasting time; investigating the security of Linux code approval is a good use of time.
1) How did they hit stable then? [0]
2) Yes, emails absolutely need IRB sign-off too. If you email a bunch of people asking for their health info or doing a survey, the IRB would smack you for unapproved human research without consent. Consent was obviously not given here.
[0] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/CADVatmNgU7t-Co84tSS6VW=3N...
1) They did not hit stable. GKH is referring, in this email, to a legitimate attempt to contribute from a student at UMN. Whether or not this student was part of the hypocrite commits study, I don't know. But it's not a hypocrite commit, just a normal buggy commit. You can tell, because it's from a umn.edu email address, which they did not use for hypocrite commits.
2) I don't actually care about the internal policies of UMN's IRB. Whether or not the study's approval was proper and whether they would get into trouble with their boss is not my problem. The point is that what they did is obviously not immoral or unethical.
The point of an IRB is to act as an outside reviewer of _ethics_. IRBs aren't some checklist thing admin put in to protect the University's reputation, they exist as a direct reaction to huge amounts of unethical human experimentation occurring last century.
The point of an IRB is to stop you from nonconsentually sterilizing people. As long as the system stops that from happening, I don't care about the paperwork. It's not my concern.
The "ethical" issues with this study do not rise to the level that I care, so the only objection is that they didn't get the IRB to rubber stamp it beforehand, which I also don't care about.
The stupid thing about the experiment was that it's never been a secret that the kernel is vulnerable to malicious patches. The kernel community understood this long before these academics wasted kernel maintainer time with a silly experiment.
Agree, to me this "research" is like proving grocery stores are vulnerable to theft by sending students to shoplift. If review process guaranteed that vulnerabilities can't pass, wouldn't that mean that the current kernel should be pristinely devoid of them?
Well I didn’t know and thanks to them now I know.
I believe most people believe that the Linux kernel couldn’t be compromised because there is multiple approval process and highly professional people vetoing.
It seems like a big vulnerability, if a teacher assistant could do that, there is no doubt that government agencies can too.
>Then, there’s the dicier issue of whether an experiment like this amounts to human experimentation. It doesn’t, according to the University of Minnesota’s Institutional Review Board. Lu and Wu applied for approval in response to the outcry, and they were granted a formal letter of exemption.
I had to apply for exemptions often in grad school. You must do so before performing the research -- it is not ethical to wait for outcry then apply after the fact. Any well run CS department trains it's incoming students on IRB procedures during orientation, and Minnesota risks all federal funding if they continue to allow researchers to operate in this manner.
(Also "exempt" usually refers to exempt from the more rigorous level of review used for medical experiments -- you still need to articulate why your experiment is exempt to avoid people just doing whatever they want then asking for forgiveness after the fact)
I was honestly surprised the University of Minnesota didn’t part ways with the teacher and students who performed this bullshit research.
This level of malfeasance strikes me as something akin to plagiarism for a professional writer.
Imo, the experiment was worthwhile, it exposed a risk, hopefully the kernel is better armed against similar attacks now.
They retaliated against the entire university. I don't think they learned anything.
What's the alternative to banning bad actors? Making Linux maintainers take every spam commit 100% seriously as if it was legitimate? All that would bring about is that the second "research project" would be about spamming commits to the Linux kernel to DDOS the maintainers.
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Pretty ridiculous. If I send them an email with a stupid question wasting their time on purpose just to see if they'll reply is that "human experimentation"? What a loose definition.
More to the point; are they salty because the author has possibly proved that it's most certainly possible to get critical flaws into the Linux kernel with social engineering? How else is something like that meant to be tested?
If you give them a heads-up they'll pay more attention for a short duration of time.
Did they ever get un-banned ? IIRC, that Univ has/had great Computer Science Dept.
But there is always the BSDs.
The Gopher protocol was made there!
Yes, and I use Gopher as a B/U of my Gemini Capsule. A couple of years ago I moved my site to Gemini with Gopher as a mirror.
I found doing that makes maintenance far easier that what I had to do with html.
While I did see some problems with their approach (i.e. doing the IRB reviews retroactively instead of doing them ahead of time, and not properly disclosing the experiments afterwards), I think this research is valuable, and I don't think the authors were too unethical. The event that this most reminds me of the Sokal Squared scandal, where researchers sent bogus papers to journals in order to test those journal's peer review standards.
Wasting time — it’s just burning trust, and the reaction was entirely predictable.
a/b testing the insertion of vulnerable code is not a good idea.
The uni should just donate to the Linux maintainers for damages - however much time was wasted - and just move on its merry way.
Money is money and buys time, no harm done, useful research conducted, and a whole lot of publicity gained.
> If a sufficiently motivated, unscrupulous person can put themselves into a trusted position of updating critical software, there’s honestly little that can be done to stop them,” says White, the security researcher.
That says a lot about Linux kernel safety.
thats literally like 90% of anything. This is open source, code maintained in large swaths by volunteers. Obviously there is not extensive background checks that are being done, the amount of resources that would require is not something the Linux Foundation probably has.