I fail to understand / find the gist of this article.
Article describes the technical aspects of the bug, how it got handled by different vendors...AI position on it...
But, one would always ask themselves, why did the author write this article? That part hasn't been clear to me even after going through much of the article.
GoogleGroups (slight tangent) Go programs enable MPTCP by default, exposing them to Linux CVE-2026-98432 (9 points, 3 hours ago, 4 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50298526
Would dropping these specialized ipv4 syn packets with extra header size beyond 20 bytes (as indicated by options value >5) with the firewall be low enough in the order of things to mitigate the attack? Like, iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --syn -m u32 --u32 "0>>24&0xF=6:15" -j DROP ?
Given these types of security bugs that are being found left and right, I reckon there's going to be an uptick in hiring of software engineers to fix them.
This one is quite serious and the type of vulnerability is once again, a C style memory corruption and a race condition combined; leading to an RCE.
At this point, we seriously need to discuss whether if the major projects still written in C such as Linux, Chromium and even git can even handle the stream of now near infinite bugs being discovered with AI.
Attackers are already rapidly finding and building exploits for those vulnerabilities the moment they are discovered with abliterated frontier-level models.
These sort of vulnerabilities are far to common in those projects and in the future, it will be extremely unsafe for even experts to continue using C or C++ in any way.
> Attackers are already rapidly finding and building exploits for those vulnerabilities the moment they are discovered with abliterated frontier-level models.
Are they? Distributions are rating this at a lower severity presumably because it can’t be easily exploited.
I bet there's a half-life to bugs though. Bugs might be infinite over the lifespan of a project, but the rate that they are produced goes down with our ability to detect them.
A lot are being found _now_ in projects written in C because the backlog of bugs to find is mostly written in C. We haven't yet gotten to the point when we're detecting most bugs before they're released, but we will.
Things won't get worse for too long. If we haven't already surpassed it, we're approaching the point of being able to do static analysis and ensure the mathematical correctness of the most complex C programs ever written so far.
I don't use C or C++, but look how much safer it is to use C or C++ these days.
Unless someone vibecodes a new OS and convinces everyone to use it, we're stuck with what we got. Reaching feature parity with Linux and then debugging it to the point where it'd be usable is a gargantuan undertaking.
You severely underestimate humanity's goalpost moving capabilities.
The state of cope:
- models are still not intelligent, they're just like, uhh, really good semantic fuzzers! so you can just put them in the loop, they'll fuzz your code, and all is good :)
- the number of bugs is "finite", so - esp with agentic help - we'll just catch up and all will be good :)
Annoyingly, the cope frontier is kinda right about both of these, so the joke shall go on. The only real counter to it would be to bring up that this finiteness claim only really applies to a frozen set of security boundaries and attack surfaces, but they'll probably just raise this being "an academic tier concern" and just tell you to ""fuzz"" more.
So ironically, it looks like these practices are rescued once again, and the bare minimum stays winning. It also starts being moved to the territory of the magic box, but I guess nobody cares about that anymore. Local AI will just get really good too, fully competitive and self hostable even. Any day now.
Pattern worth flagging: this is the second kernel UAF in a packet-handling subsystem to hit the news this cycle — the recent PHP2Shell chain used an XFRM ESP-in-TCP UAF to escalate from www-data to root. Both bugs sit on the "mark-then-free" side of the race (SOCK_DEAD-bit-equivalent patterns).
On patch validation specifically: the right smoke test is a reproducer that FAILS without the mark being set, not "no crash in syzkaller for N hours." Those are different quality bars, and the article doesn't address which one this patch cleared.
Not sure why the article doesn't mention it, but you can specifically check for MPTCP listeners using `ss -M`.
> ListenConfig now uses MPTCP by default on systems where it is supported (currently on Linux only).
This seems to imply basically any golang server built since February 2025 is going to be at least attempting to use it.
Everyone using LLMs needs to stop shipping their first draft.
Article describes the technical aspects of the bug, how it got handled by different vendors...AI position on it...
But, one would always ask themselves, why did the author write this article? That part hasn't been clear to me even after going through much of the article.
Ubuntu (34 points, 16 hours ago, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50287647
CVE.org (2 points, 7 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50295879
GoogleGroups (slight tangent) Go programs enable MPTCP by default, exposing them to Linux CVE-2026-98432 (9 points, 3 hours ago, 4 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50298526
At this point, we seriously need to discuss whether if the major projects still written in C such as Linux, Chromium and even git can even handle the stream of now near infinite bugs being discovered with AI.
Attackers are already rapidly finding and building exploits for those vulnerabilities the moment they are discovered with abliterated frontier-level models.
These sort of vulnerabilities are far to common in those projects and in the future, it will be extremely unsafe for even experts to continue using C or C++ in any way.
Are they? Distributions are rating this at a lower severity presumably because it can’t be easily exploited.
A lot are being found _now_ in projects written in C because the backlog of bugs to find is mostly written in C. We haven't yet gotten to the point when we're detecting most bugs before they're released, but we will.
Things won't get worse for too long. If we haven't already surpassed it, we're approaching the point of being able to do static analysis and ensure the mathematical correctness of the most complex C programs ever written so far.
I don't use C or C++, but look how much safer it is to use C or C++ these days.
Edit: also thanks for using RCE correctly, it seems to be any kind of code execution these days is considered "RCE".. boo.
The state of cope:
- models are still not intelligent, they're just like, uhh, really good semantic fuzzers! so you can just put them in the loop, they'll fuzz your code, and all is good :)
- the number of bugs is "finite", so - esp with agentic help - we'll just catch up and all will be good :)
Annoyingly, the cope frontier is kinda right about both of these, so the joke shall go on. The only real counter to it would be to bring up that this finiteness claim only really applies to a frozen set of security boundaries and attack surfaces, but they'll probably just raise this being "an academic tier concern" and just tell you to ""fuzz"" more.
So ironically, it looks like these practices are rescued once again, and the bare minimum stays winning. It also starts being moved to the territory of the magic box, but I guess nobody cares about that anymore. Local AI will just get really good too, fully competitive and self hostable even. Any day now.
From the horse's mouth, in case you were suspecting these descriptions to be in bad faith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnV_cWeoo5Q
On patch validation specifically: the right smoke test is a reproducer that FAILS without the mark being set, not "no crash in syzkaller for N hours." Those are different quality bars, and the article doesn't address which one this patch cleared.