Summary
- The Linux Foundation, joined by leading organizations, today announced Akrites, a coordinated effort to remediate and disclose vulnerabilities in critical open source software.
- Akrites establishes a shared Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) and a single, standardized Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) process, built on confidentiality-first principles and industry-standard tooling.
- Founding members commit engineering talent, security expertise and funding to harden the shared open source software that banks, hospitals, power grids, telecoms, governments, and AI labs depend on.
- Organizations that contribute engineering resources or funding to the security of critical open source are invited to participate and can learn more at https://akrites.org/.
These are all grifts by the Linux foundation in concert with corporations to still not pay for open source development.
I wish they would stop putting AI code into the kernel though. That also appears to be degrading security, among many other issues. There’s a longer list here: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/e12330b9-c29e-45ca-9375-9e3d13426d85@horse64.org/T/
The Code Rabbit link is about software in general, not the Linux kernel in particular. In many ways the Linux kernel is an outlier among software projects. When it comes to LLMs, I don’t expect devs will be using lower standards for code reviews in quality, while some other teams definitely are doing light “LGTM” reviews of AI code.
The second link expresses a lot of concerns about plagiarism by AI. Certainly related care needs to taken for contributions to the Linux kernel. As far as I could tell, no specific cases of plagiarized code in the kernel were cited.
I agree the kernel devs appear to think they can outsmart the LLM slop problem.
But unless they were able to suddenly get way faster at reviews without a quality drop, which I doubt they did, this indicates it’s not working out: https://www.neowin.net/news/linus-torvalds-declares-massive-ai-fueled-code-surges-as-the-new-normal-for-linux/
As far as I could tell, no specific cases of plagiarized code in the kernel were cited.
You should look at the studies for that. Given the rate of it, in my opinion it seems like the question is rather where these plagiarized items are not whether they exist.
- Akrites establishes a shared Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) and a single, standardized Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) process, built on confidentiality-first principles and industry-standard tooling.
Soo XKCD 927?
It’s nice that some resources are being directed in this area, but it’s far from a total solution.
For example, the passport-saml Node module is popular and security related and is already fielding a number of AI-assisted security vulns.
Even when they are contributed by “security experts”, they still have to be carefully vetted to confirm they are correct and not themselves malicious.
While the patches may be good, it appears to be generating more unpaid volunteer labor for the maintainers.
Thankfully there some other fund’s trying to help out maintainers of critical open source projects.
