Curious what has happened this week in the world of Linux development. The University of Minnesota has been banned from Linux development by introduce vulnerabilities on purpose. The reason is a research work being carried out by Qiushi Wu (PhD student) and Kangjie Lu (Assistant Professor) on the feasibility of sneaking vulnerabilities into open source software. The paper can be found on GitHub.
These researchers tried to put a Use-After-Free vulnerability in the Linux kernel, among other commits. That has caused Greg Kroah-Hartman, one of the most important kernel developers and responsible for maintaining the stable branch, decided to ban the University of Minnesota completely Linux development, something that the university itself has confirmed.
