Quishi Wu and Kangjie Lu from the University of Minnesota were the two students who knowingly submitted patches to the Linux kernel containing security flaws to see whether they would be accepted. They published a paper on it and put their names at the top so they must be pretty proud of themselves, and I hope all the employers they contact for a job in the future know who they are.<br>The paper even claims they immediately contacted maintainers when the patches were accepted, except that they didn't, and Linux kernel maintainers pointed out that their security flaws did make it into the main branch.,(reply>), @TheBetabot yea, it actually was. The ethics of it were anything but good. It should never have been approved. Outside that, this reveals a lot about how easy it is to make the kernel insecure/backdoored, and probably explains why so many critical CVEs are found in it every year.,(reply>), @sktmd rmn No, it was not. It was highly unethical and it's only right that U of M was banned from contributing to the Linux kernel for knowingly adding security flaws to it. How many billions of people rely on this code? Billions of Android smartphones, the vast majority of the Internet's infrastructure, banks, telcos, <b>so much</b> relies on Linux. It's not a playground and they put everyone at risk with this "research".,(reply>), @sktmd rmn No it really wasn't. First of all you don't just go and say "bra it was just a social experiment" when messing with critical infrastructure. Second every ethics review board on the planet would have denied the experiment because you don't experiment on people without their knowledge and consent. The fact that the student were able to decide if they wanted to get approval from the universities irb shows that the university has a massive problem.,(reply>), it was a good study tho