The start of a worrisome Linux security trend

Security

Or is it just life today, with AI constantly digging through code repositories in search of security holes?

OPINION Dirty Frag, Copy Fail, and Fragnesia are less a random cluster of Linux bugs and more the public unveiling of how AI tools can pry open security holes with just a prompt or two. What they also have in common is their shared abuse of a core kernel abstraction: The page cache. What does this mean for you and me? Is this the rainstorm before a downpour of killer Linux security problems, or is this just a shower? It depends on who you ask.

Whatever else may be true, these problems must be addressed. As Igor Seletskiy, CEO of CloudLinux, said: “The real story here is that we typically see one or two kernel-level LPE (Linux privilege escalations) vulnerabilities that affect multiple distros/versions per year. And now we see two such vulnerabilities one week apart. We should expect this trend to continue for quite a few months, meaning companies might have to reboot servers weekly.”

Ouch!

But is this the start of a trend? Linus Torvalds, who knows a thing or two about Linux, said at Open Source Summit North America in Minneapolis that until recently, the kernel community would quietly notify distributions about a bug and ask them to upgrade without detailing the vulnerability, and “most of the time, nobody would figure out what happened.” That was then. This is now. With AI‑accelerated analysis, he recalled that “last week, we fixed the bug; within three hours, there was a blog post about the implications of that bug fix, because security people love getting attention.”

As a result of this kind of thing, Torvalds has changed how the Linux security community will deal with AI-discovered security holes. “AI-detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved – and only makes that duplication worse because the reporters can’t even see each other’s reports.” 

In addition, Torvalds added, in the case of AI-discovered bugs, you need to keep in mind that just “because you found it with AI, 100 other people also found it with AI.”

That means we’re going to hear a lot more about Linux security problems. But are they getting worse? I asked Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux stable kernel maintainer, and he told me: “Maybe? It’s hard to tell; the ‘recent’ ones really are very minor, as the number of systems that have ‘untrusted users’ is not common anymore. I don’t see any real uptick in our actual bug fixes that I can tell.”

He continued: “We fix bugs like that on a daily basis, it’s just the rise of people wanting to ‘name a bug’ and release a public exploit seems to be all the rage at the moment.”

An important point that Chris Wright, Red Hat’s CTO, made at Red Hat Summit, the week before, is that in “security, all things aren’t created equal. There will always be a spectrum of vulnerabilities that will surface. Some of those will be really critical and we will need to respond very quickly, so that becomes a clear priority. Others will have a longer tail of lower severity.” 

Torvalds also added at Open Source Summit that just because you read stories about Linux and AI-discovered bugs, you shouldn’t think the same thing isn’t happening to proprietary software, such as Windows. “If you think that AI can’t reverse engineer closed source, you’re in for a surprise.” In fact, he warned, “closed source is even worse in this respect, because the AI can’t help you fix those problems, but the AI sure can help find those problems in the first place.”

He also discouraged security researchers from publishing working exploits: “When it comes to things that really are security issues, you may not want to make the exploit public… Don’t be that guy who then crows about it publicly and says, ‘Look, I could bring down this big company.’”

Following on this theme, Christopher “CRob” Robinson, chief security architect for the Open Source Software Foundation (OpenSSF), told The Register that thanks to AI, “roughly 30 percent of reported Linux security bugs were duplicates. That’s going to be another problem in this AI age, where everybody’s a researcher, right, with a $20 cloud code account.” That, in turn, will burden already overworked maintainers with yet more patches to deal with.

Linux, Torvalds added, is something that its maintainers can handle. Smaller open source projects, however, are all too likely to be overwhelmed.

The real problem, according to what the Google Threat Intelligence Group has discovered, is that the mean time to exploit (TTE) for vulnerabilities has continually decreased “from 63 days in 2018 to -1 day in 2024 and further downward to an estimated -7 days in 2025. A negative number indicates that exploitation of a vulnerability, on average, occurred before a patch was released.”

So what does this mean? Yes, we’re going to see a lot more security vulnerabilities showing up in Linux and other open source projects. Yes, some of them will be serious, and all too many will have exploits out before the patches arrive. It’s not, however, that Linux has suddenly become less secure. It’s that AI eyes are much better at detecting bugs than human eyes have ever been. We will catch up, and AI can help with that, too. 

In the meantime, system administrators and developers will have to be more security-conscious than ever before. As Wright told The Reg, it’s high time we switched from using SELinux in permissive to restrictive mode. Enforcing strict security is a pain, but what’s even more of a pain is having to rebuild your containers and servers after a serious attack gets through. ®