>“Due to the layer at which the Linux kernel is in a system, almost any bug might be exploitable to compromise the security of the kernel… Because of this, the CVE assignment team is overly cautious and assign CVE numbers to any bugfix that they identify.”
https://docs.kernel.org/process/cve.html
"number of cves" is a useless metric, especially when it comes to the kernel.
If you're willing to stretch, missing but planned features also deny the use of said features since they haven't been added yet, and so are CVSS 1/Low vulnerabilities.
Resume-driven development for security researchers has never been easier!
That doesn't follow. In the extremely simple example, an adding service returning 1+1=3 has a bug, but it's not a possible DoS situation at all.
> missing but planned features also deny the use of said features
That's not what DoS is.
This whole situation with CVE assigning comes from the whole process being far from ideal. But it doesn't mean it's completely useless and doesn't follow any rules at all.
I do find it interesting though, that in the interest of transparency, every bugfix gets a CVE. Which ends up being a huge number… which will ultimately yield a more insecure environment as we’re getting conditioned to ignore/discount CVEs by the volume.
Over-reporting in this case seems to risk being counterproductive.
Kernel development is well-funded, both via grants and by direct employment at big tech companies, and if they wanted to properly triage and annotate vulnerabilities, and provide reasonable assessments of what is or isn't likely to be a security risk, they absolutely could. They almost certainly could go to Google and say "we need two people full-time on your payroll for this" and they would get it.
I don't want to dunk on them too much because they're generally doing God's work, but these absolutist security stances are not worth being taken seriously.
It's basically saying that they can't possibly provide a valuable service for 99.999% of the install base because there might a hypothetical person out there using Linux in a really weird way. If Microsoft tried to make an argument like that, they'd get crucified.
The frequency and severity of cyber attacks has increased to the point a much more cautious approach has become common. It's also easier to sell this work to management when you can point at the security tab on some tool and say "Look we need to patch these CVEs"
But, does that all of these being found now call into question, not the open source model logic itself, but the ability of human eyes to find security issues? These vulnerabilities have been sitting here for however long, but how many thousands of humans did not find them before AI?
For Linux, the threshold is nearer to the point of it being questionable whether a bug is even exploitable on a real production distro, compiled and run with any sort of sane configuration.
Long term I suspect that the purpose of the digital domain is going to end up being rethought. For instance connecting critical infrastructure to the internet has always been a terrible idea, and LLMs will just make that even more clear.
Apparently by late summer this year, there were already more vulnerabilities found than in all of 2025.
Seems like an enormous increase over 2024 and 2025.
I suggest this post be renamed “A legion of vulnerabilities has been discovered…”
These get released every few weeks. Tons of CVEs. If a kernel developer farts in the forest, does anyone hear it?
August saw separate Debian kernel updates released four days apart. Does anyone even reboot that often?
I have three kernels installed over the last 45 days or so and I probably missed a few.
Remotely or locally exploitable? This is very lacking on information.
one again illustrating the importance of encapsulating unsafe behavior. perhaps c should get a __UNSAFE { } block, where memory access is encapsulated and thus most bugs occurring outside of those blocks do not need to be marked as CVEs.
I think the convention for this is at the filesystem level and most programmers use the `.c` suffix to indicate it
Wonder how many of these NSA and others been sitting on, for how long and how many are still there? I guess the silver lining with the aixplosion of CVEs is that software eventually will get more secure.
Now they just give almost every bug a CVE number.
https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/l...
Searching around, the best I have found so far for vanilla kernels is: https://linuxcvetracker.com
It does require a little clicking around to get all the info I want though. Time to pull out curl+awk! :)
alternative link, clearer source: https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2026/msg00... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49891411)
On the iphone for example even if you find a crippling bug in iOS which gives you full root access, there is still no way to get the device encryption key or face ID info because the secure enclave simply has no electrical connection that can pass that key to the OS.
Until someone finds there is a user input they can trigger this bug causing some other bit of code to read data from the wrong offset and now it's a whole exploit.
Wouldn't this mean people are actually encountering issues where there are none before? Likely some serious enough that they lead to exploits where there weren't before? Where are the reports of these new defects?
>Note, due to the layer at which the Linux kernel is in a system, almost any bug might be exploitable to compromise the security of the kernel, but the possibility of exploitation is often not evident when the bug is fixed. Because of this, the CVE assignment team are overly cautious and assign CVE numbers to any bugfix that they identify. This explains the seemingly large number of CVEs that are issued by the Linux kernel team.
Microsoft kinda got this right by doing it once a month, unless it's something horribly bad, you can plan your maintenance around a predictable calendar.
You can skip the Xanax this week.
perhaps we could call it a sedimentchest?