> What does it matter whether the contributor knew ahead of time that they were submitting insecure code?

It's a specific threat model they were exploring: a malicious actor introducing vulnerability on purpose.

> Couldn't they just look at the history of security vulnerabilities in the kernel, and analyze how long it took for them to be detected?

Perhaps they could. I guess it'd involve much more work, and could've yielded zero results - after all, I don't think there are any documented examples when a vulnerability was proven to have been introduced on purpose.

> what's the point of all this subterfuge in the first place?

Control over the experimental setup, which is important for validity of research. Notice how most research involves gathering up fresh subjects and controls - scientists don't chase around the world looking for people or objects that, by chance, already did the things they're testing for. They want fresh subjects to better account for possible confounders, and hopefully make the experiment reproducible.

(Similarly, when chasing software bugs, you could analyze old crash dumps all day to try and identify a bug - and you may start with that - but you always want to eventually reproduce the bug yourself. Ultimately, "I can and did that" is always better than "looking at past data, I guess it could happen".)

> It's seems equivalent to vandalising Wikipedia to see how long it takes for someone to repair the damage you caused.

Honestly, I wouldn't object to that experiment either. It wouldn't do much harm (little additional vandalism doesn't matter on the margin, the base rate is already absurd), and could yield some social good. Part of the reason to have public research institutions is to allow researchers to do things that would be considered bad if done by random individual.

Also note that both Wikipedia and Linux kernel are essentially infrastructure now. Running research like this against them makes sense, where running the same research against a random small site / OSS project wouldn't.

It potentially has long term negative impact on the experimental subjects involved and has no research benefit. The researchers should be removed from university and the university itself should be sued and lose enough money that they act more responsible in the future. It’s a very slippery slope to from casual irb wavers to Tuskegee experiments.

Ah, but youre missing the fact that discovered vulnerabilities are now trophies in the security industry. This is potentially gold in your CV.

Of note here: Wikipedia has a specific policy prohibiting this sort of experimentation. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:NOTLAB

It is, but that is how security testing goes about in general (in the commercial world.) Of its application to research and ethics, I’m not much of an authority.

In general you try to obtain consent from their boss, so that if the people you pentested on complain you can point to their boss and say "Hey they agreed to it" and that will be the end of the story. In this case it's not clear who the "boss" is but something like the Linux Foundation would be a good start.

> That was done, was it not?

The allegation being made on the mailing list is that some incorrect patches of theirs made it into git and even the stable trees. As there is not presently an enumeration of them, or which ones are alleged to be incorrect, I cannot state whether this is true.

But that's the claim.

edit: And looking at [1], they have a bunch of relatively tiny patches to a lot of subsystems, so depending on how narrowly gregkh means "rip it all out", this may be a big diff.

edit 2: On rereading [2], I may have been incorrectly conflating the assertion about "patches containing deliberate bugs" with "patches that have been committed". Though if they're ripping everything out anyway, it appears they aren't drawing a distinction either...

[1] - https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux...

[2] - https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YH%2F8jcoC1ffuksrf@kroah.c...