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.
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!
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…”
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)
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.
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!
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.