oss-security - Re: Precise disclosure contents for copyfail (Re: CVE-2026-31431: CopyFail: linux local privilege scalation)

Follow @Openwall on Twitter for new release announcements and other news

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Message-ID: <2026050435-c08cb4e9297e204898fa6911@gregkh>
Date: Mon, 4 May 2026 19:38:22 +0200
From: Greg KH <greg@...ah.com>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Cc: Sam James <sam@...too.org>, Taeyang Lee <0wn@...ori.io>,
	Brad Spengler <spender@...ecurity.net>,
	Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
Subject: Re: Precise disclosure contents for copyfail (Re:
 CVE-2026-31431: CopyFail: linux local privilege scalation)

On Mon, May 04, 2026 at 05:44:52PM +0100, Emily Shepherd wrote:
> > Why this specific one is somehow
> > more "special" than others was not obvious except after the fact because
> > the submitter decided to provide their exploit code to the world to show
> > off their tool
> 
> Was the PoC of the exploit / some description of its severity not
> made available by the reporter to the security team / maintainer when
> they reported it?

I honestly do not remember, that was months and hundreds, if not
thousands, of reports ago.

The job of the kernel security team is to triage a bug report, drag in
the relevant maintainer/developer, get the issue fixed and merged into
Linus's tree as soon as possible.  Once it lands in Linus's tree, our
role is over.

We do not do "announcements" of anything to anyone, so even if this was
a "look how bad you can abuse the system" type of thing, we would not be
telling anyone anything.

This is not a new process, we've worked this way for a very very long
time (almost since our start in 2005, with some exceptions when we
attempted to interact with the distros list for a while, but that was
many many years ago.)

I've also documented this in detail in many talks and even recently in a
set of blog posts about how the kernel security team works.  That should
be easy to find online if people want more detail.

thanks,

greg k-h

Please check out the Open Source Software Security Wiki, which is counterpart to this mailing list.

Confused about mailing lists and their use? Read about mailing lists on Wikipedia and check out these guidelines on proper formatting of your messages.