Re: thoughts on kernel security issues

[Dmitry Torokhov]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 13:37:10 -0500, John Richard Moser
<nigelenki@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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> 
> Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, John Richard Moser wrote:
> >
> >>It's kind of like locking your front door, or your back door.  If one is
> >>locked and the other other is still wide open, then you might as well
> >>not even have doors.  If you lock both, then you (finally) create a
> >>problem for an intruder.
> >>
> >>That is to say, patch A will apply and work without B; patch B will
> >>apply and work without patch A; but there's no real gain from using
> >>either without the other.
> >
> >
> > Sure there is. There's the gain that if you lock the front door but not
> > the back door, somebody who goes door-to-door, opportunistically knocking
> > on them and testing them, _will_ be discouraged by locking the front door.
> >
> 
> In the real world yes.  On the computer, the front and back doors are
> half-consumed by a short-path wormhole that places them right next to
> eachother, so not really.  :)
> 

Then one might argue that doing any security patches is meaningless
because, as with bugs, there will always be some other hole not
covered by both A and B so why bother?

-- 
Dmitry
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