Newsdesk
University banned for ‘hypocrite commits’
LINUX KERNEL
Students had been experimenting on the Linux kernel, and the community, without consent.
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The University of Minnesota has been banned from contributing to the Linux kernel after two researchers from the institution were discovered deliberately submitting patches with flaws.
Qiushi Wu and Kangjie Lu’s paper (http://bit. ly/LXF277Paper) reveals how they submitted patches to the kernel to fix issues, but in fact introduced problems – which the researchers called ‘hypocrite commits’. They claimed this would show how malicious users could slip dangerous code into the kernel, in a similar way to how white hat hackers identify security holes in software. Of course, white hat hackers are invited to find security holes by the people behind the software, and are often given rewards for doing so. Wu and Lu neither asked nor told anyone in the community what they were doing.