Anyway, this is a disaster. It was extremely irresponsible to share the exploit with the world before the distributions shipped the fix. Who knows how many shared hosting providers were hacked with this.
It's also worrying that it seems there's no communication between the kernel security team and distribution maintainers. One would hope that the former would notify the latter, but apparently it's the responsibility of whoever finds the vulnerability.
As a user and admin I disagree. Makes one appreciate what a masterful bit of lexical-engineering “Responsible” Disclosure is, kinda like “Secure” (from me, not forme) Boot — “Responsible” Disclosure is 100% about reputation-management for the various corporation/foundation middleman entities sitting between me and my computer.
Those groups don't care that my individual computer is vulnerable but about nobody being able to say “RHEL is vulnerable” or “Ubuntu is vulnerable”. The vulnerability exists for me either way, and I'd rather have the chance to know about it and minimize risk than to be surprised by the fix and hope nothing bad happened in that meantime.
Immediate public disclosure is the only choice that isn't irresponsible as far as I'm concerned.
That’s what you’re saying here.
> Is your software AI-era safe?
> Copy Fail was surfaced by Xint Code about an hour of scan time against the Linux crypto/ subsystem. [...]
> [Try Xint Code]
More chaos makes their product seem even more attractive.
Sure, they have no legal obligation to disclose, but we all also have no legal obligation to buy their services. Blacklisting bad actors like this is the right move to discourage this kind of behavior.
I just don't see the point in complaining about how shirking the norms of your industry will make you look irresponsible. I don't really care that they could have decided to sell the vulnerability instead. It isn't material.
The only important system that uses it as a security boundary is Android and there is mitigated by the fact that APKs need user approval, plus strict SELinux and seccomp policy plus the GrapheneOS hardening, and in this case the mitigations succeeded (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/35110-grapheneos-is-protect...)
I'm honestly unaware of what systems could be put in place to prevent this but expecting people to always do the right thing is fantasy level thinking. I mean I bet the disclosers that they would during the right thing, hence why it's a bad thing to rely on.
But publishing a working exploit together with the disclosure before patches are available is really really irresponsible, maybe even criminal.
And no, the proposed mitigations don't help with half of the distributions out there...
What’s your theory here? What crime?
But it’s not the law anywhere I’m aware of today, and I’d not support it becoming a law.
Edit: As of this writing, most distros including Redhat, Fedora, Debian Stable, do not have patches available in the package repos, though they're being actively worked on.
Considering that the patches have been available for a while, someone surely reversed what they were for and was actually exploiting this in the wild.
In the age of AI, I’d argue that “responsible disclosure” is dead. Arguably even in closed source projects. Just ask Claude to do a diff between the previous version and to see whether anything fixed in there could have had security implications.
We’re not there yet, but very soon the only way to responsibly disclose a vulnerability will be immediately.
With the way linux is used these days, I'd guess the number of systems with untrusted local users is pretty limited. Even with shared hosting, you generally have root in your VM or container anyway. Unless this enables an escape from that?
Still the risk that people who run "curl | bash" without care could get bitten, but usually its "curl | sudo bash" anyway...
Lots of shared hosters don't use VMs or containers. It's some arbitrary number of people logging in to a shared system, each one with a home directory under /home/THE_USER_NAME. i've had several such hosters over the years (thankfully not right now, though).
So containers don't protect you, only a VM.
But even if you think making unethical decisions in personal self interest is something no one should be criticized for, surely the Linux kernel team ought to have some process for notifying the top distributions of an upcoming LPE, just out of practicality.
Distros are downstream of kernel, that doesn’t entitle them to expect to be contacted directly by every security reporter. That’s not on them. Distros that are big enough should be plugged into the linux security team for notifications.
Security researchers cannot be held responsible for broken lines of communication within the org charts of projects that they study. They’re providing a valuable public service already, how much more do you want?
Any strategy that assumes that the rest of the world is functional or makes you personally responsible for fixing all of it is equally broken but there is a reasonable middle ground and sending a few more emails lies within it
Yes it does. That's how it's always been done and distros can ship a fix well before it ends up in a kernel release.
Partly they have a strong belief that all kernel bugs are vulnerabilities and all vulnerabilities are just bugs; sometimes taken to the extreme in both ways (on one hand this case where the vulnerability is almost ignored; on the other hand, I saw cases where a VM panic that could be triggered only by a misbehaving host—which could just choose to stop executing the VM—was given a CVE).
Most people in tech think like the techie in this comic strip.
The hilarious bit is that the idea that they needed to coordinate is clearly broken even in just this example. They did give prior notice to the Linux developers, who issued a patch. And they’re still getting raked over the coals in this comment page by armchair quarterbacks who have decided they needed to coordinate with specific distros. If they’d coordinated with those distros, somebody would have a pet distro that didn’t make the cut and they’d be pissed about that.
There are risks no matter how they do it, and there will be people who are pissed no matter how they do it. Security researchers don’t owe anybody a specific methodology.
So I feel like the argument reduces into "why is it a problem that now anyone could exploit it, if some people were exploiting it already". Which imho isn't a sensible argument because the issue is clearly the amount of people capable of using the exploit for nefarious purposes, which has increased.
“Because we can’t know if there was exploitation by existing parties who had discovered the vulnerability on their own, there are upsides to disclosing earlier so that affected users can take mitigating steps and review their systems for indicators of compromise. Additionally, the more projects the researchers pull into the loop for coordinated disclosure, the higher the likelihood that they further leak the vulnerability to more attackers.”
However the issue is that we cannot know if the attack space has been broadened or lessened as a consequence of this disclosure, because of how eager it was. If it wasn't eager then we could much more comfortable in suggesting that the attack space has probably been reduced.
Given the exploit had been living in the linux code base undetected for so long in the first place, I think its fair to state that disclosing the exploit prior to the distributions being ready and given the distributions are the principal attack vector of the exploit: that the researcher has made the situation worse and should reflect on their actions.
Maybe a decade of corporations with revenue in the billions, paying peanuts and coffee money, for critical vulnerability disclosures made it....
It is a really really bad look for Linux, puts a bit of water on all hype around switching from Windows.
No OS is perfect. The awkward rollout for this bug fix is proof of that.
Said no one ever...present post excluded :-))
Yes, this was clearly a marketing stunt to promote Xint code.
I, for one, will never use Xint code and will advise everyone to never use it. To anyone working there: enjoy your 15 minutes, I hope this backfires right in your face.
Why would they imply it is incumbent on the reporter to liaise with distributions? That seems to assume a high level of familiarity with the linux project. Vulnerability reporters shouldn’t be responsible for directly working with every downstream consumer of the linux kernel, what’s the limiting principal there? Should the reporter also be directly talking to all device manufacturers that use Linux on their machines?
IMO reporter did more than enough by responsibly disclosing it to linux and waiting for a patch to land.
Aren’t there people in the linux project itself with authority over and responsibility for security vulnerabilities? One would think they would be the ones notifying downstream distros…
https://docs.kernel.org/process/security-bugs.html
```As such, the kernel security team strongly recommends that as a reporter of a potential security issue you DO NOT contact the “linux-distros” mailing list UNTIL a fix is accepted by the affected code’s maintainers and you have read the distros wiki page above and you fully understand the requirements that contacting “linux-distros” will impose on you and the kernel community. ```
Everyone involved here failed to do the right thing, and hiding behind the lack of written words is weak sauce.
A security researcher's ethical obligations are to protect users over vendors (barring any contractual agreement in place). From what has been discussed in this thread, they meet that bar.
Sure, they could have gone the extra mile to ensure the distros were in a good place to patch before they published the exploit. That's a kindness you can wish for, but don't disparage them for not going that extra mile. It's a bonus.
It's also possible that it simply didn't occur to them to do so this time. There's certainly lessons to be learned either way. I don't know that the right lessons will emerge from hostility.
and this is the problem. It used to be the case that if you were smart enough to find an exploit you were also smart enough to realise what would happen if you irresponsibly disclosed it. I guess these tools have made that pattern no longer apply.
The skills to detect code exploits is not the same as the skills to navigate an informal org chart to the satisfaction of an amorphous audience if end users (i.e. us on HN).
That said… as they are a company that supposedly specializes in this field, and is trying to sell a product, I do believe they should do better. Right now, I don’t have much confidence in their product.
Google search: https://share.google/aimode/eihDKXZJy94Z5lC1p
and it's beyond me to not think about doing this and instead exposing everyone and their neighbor to this exploit up front.
I'm certain this is even a felony in some legislations, rightfully so.
I am running this in production right now and it mitigates the attack, with no unexpected side-effects as far as I can see.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-linux-cop...
https://github.com/theori-io/copy-fail-CVE-2026-31431/issues...
https://github.com/theori-io/copy-fail-CVE-2026-31431/issues...
Basically: sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args=initcall_blacklist=algif_aead_init
sudo reboot
Copy Fail