note that _any_ bugfix is assigned a cve, which makes for big numbers.
>“Due to the layer at which the Linux kernel is in a system, almost any bug might be exploitable to compromise the security of the kernel… Because of this, the CVE assignment team is overly cautious and assign CVE numbers to any bugfix that they identify.”
Tautologically every bug can legitimately be assigned a CVE, since every bug prevents some feature from working as intended. It's therefore a denial of service, which by the definition of the CVE system using CVSS means every bug is at least a 1/Low level vulnerability to CVSS v4.0.
If you're willing to stretch, missing but planned features also deny the use of said features since they haven't been added yet, and so are CVSS 1/Low vulnerabilities.
Resume-driven development for security researchers has never been easier!
This is great, more access did provide more eyes on these problems.
But, does that all of these being found now call into question, not the open source model logic itself, but the ability of human eyes to find security issues? These vulnerabilities have been sitting here for however long, but how many thousands of humans did not find them before AI?
Even before AI we have known that no one is smart enough to write bug free C. And with every bug being a launch platform for a full exploit it's become a big deal.
This is the reason why performant and "safe" systems languages are on the rise and being accepted into foundational areas of our operating systems (such as the kernel). When the attack defense surface is tighter (language, tooling, compiler instead of the actual code itself), the smart folks can stay at that layer, while the masses can write more code at a level of abstraction that nullifies many of these vulnerabilities by default.
Is it possible that some of these bugs were already exploited by governments? And AI might help use close of that kind of thing? (And expose other kinds of things , in a kind of AI arms race?)
Probably. Organizations specializing in hacking are probably having a great time hacking everything and installing permanent presence. It is probably like a gold rush period.
I've been doing Linux sys-admin work for 10+ years. Used to be I could read the full report on what ever vulnerabilities came out and triage which servers needed to be updated now and which could wait. A few years ago notifications started having so many it would take more time/effort to read everything than it would to patch everything. With this notification there's even ten times more...
The amount of updates on Debian "stable" has become ridiculous, it's a daily rolling release of backports at this point.
Microsoft kinda got this right by doing it once a month, unless it's something horribly bad, you can plan your maintenance around a predictable calendar.
If any of these were remotely exploitable it would be getting much louder and more urgent news. Local privilege escalation bugs are encountered all the time.
That’s probably a great thing. The initial friction of AI overwhelming projects certainly sucks, but once there are better processes to deal with them it’s going to strengthen the quality of so many projects!
Long term we will end up with software with no low hanging fruit exploits left. But right now we are in a period where low hanging fruit is everywhere and it's easier to exploit systems than ever before.
In Heroes of Might & Magic 3, “several” means 5–9. 10–19 is “pack”, 20–49 is “lots”, 50–99 is “horde”, 100–249 is “throng”, 250–499 is “swarm”, 500–999 is “zounds…” and 1000+ is “legion”.
I suggest this post be renamed “A legion of vulnerabilities has been discovered…”
https://docs.kernel.org/process/cve.html states that because almost any kernel bug can potentially compromise system security, the CVE team acts with extreme caution and labels nearly all bug fixes with a CVE
yes because the majority are memory safety issues, and it's automatically assumed that a memory safety bug can lead to a vuln
one again illustrating the importance of encapsulating unsafe behavior. perhaps c should get a __UNSAFE { } block, where memory access is encapsulated and thus most bugs occurring outside of those blocks do not need to be marked as CVEs.
I was looking earlier and the majority of these do not have a CVSS score assigned to them yet, but a lot of them that did were >7.0 (although I suppose by nature that the more impactful CVEs are going to be scored more quickly)
Is there a way to know if a particular vanilla kernel has a particular CVE addressed? Unhelpfully, the ChangeLog-* only seems to contain sporadic references to CVEs.
"Several" feels a bit of an understatement, there are 1313 CVEs listed on that page!
Wonder how many of these NSA and others been sitting on, for how long and how many are still there? I guess the silver lining with the aixplosion of CVEs is that software eventually will get more secure.
Something to keep in mind is the Linux project registered as an authority to create their own CVE numbers in 2024. Previously the majority of bugs would just be fixed without note unless there was a demonstration that it could be exploited.
Linux has never, at any point in history, lacked flaws that could be exploited to escalate privileges. The only question has been how well-known the flaws were, and when. The count of latent local privilege escalation bugs has never been zero.
>“Due to the layer at which the Linux kernel is in a system, almost any bug might be exploitable to compromise the security of the kernel… Because of this, the CVE assignment team is overly cautious and assign CVE numbers to any bugfix that they identify.”
https://docs.kernel.org/process/cve.html
"number of cves" is a useless metric, especially when it comes to the kernel.
If you're willing to stretch, missing but planned features also deny the use of said features since they haven't been added yet, and so are CVSS 1/Low vulnerabilities.
Resume-driven development for security researchers has never been easier!
But, does that all of these being found now call into question, not the open source model logic itself, but the ability of human eyes to find security issues? These vulnerabilities have been sitting here for however long, but how many thousands of humans did not find them before AI?
These get released every few weeks. Tons of CVEs. If a kernel developer farts in the forest, does anyone hear it?
August saw separate Debian kernel updates released four days apart. Does anyone even reboot that often?
I have three kernels installed over the last 45 days or so and I probably missed a few.
Microsoft kinda got this right by doing it once a month, unless it's something horribly bad, you can plan your maintenance around a predictable calendar.
Remotely or locally exploitable? This is very lacking on information.
I suggest this post be renamed “A legion of vulnerabilities has been discovered…”
Seems like an enormous increase over 2024 and 2025.
Apparently by late summer this year, there were already more vulnerabilities found than in all of 2025.
one again illustrating the importance of encapsulating unsafe behavior. perhaps c should get a __UNSAFE { } block, where memory access is encapsulated and thus most bugs occurring outside of those blocks do not need to be marked as CVEs.
I think the convention for this is at the filesystem level and most programmers use the `.c` suffix to indicate it
perhaps we could call it a sedimentchest?
https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/l...
Searching around, the best I have found so far for vanilla kernels is: https://linuxcvetracker.com
It does require a little clicking around to get all the info I want though. Time to pull out curl+awk! :)
Wonder how many of these NSA and others been sitting on, for how long and how many are still there? I guess the silver lining with the aixplosion of CVEs is that software eventually will get more secure.
Now they just give almost every bug a CVE number.