Hacker News

points by tptacek 1 day ago | 0 comments

Hey, I don't write AI blog posts. But I want to know how KVM escapes work, too.

You don't because you consider KVM to be part of Firecracker?

If you're a provider, you absolutely do; it's part of the stack. It's like saying "Ruby" isn't a part of "Rails".

This vulnerability does not require firecracker. The CVE does not mention firecracker at all.

Ruby is not Rails. The same way Linux KVM is not Firecracker. You cannot paint everything with the same brush. The author chose to make this sensationalist by implying its a firecracker issue. It is not.

I've repeatedly explained this.

[–] tptacek 11 hours ago

You've repeatedly claimed it, but the logic doesn't hold. KVM is a dependency for Firecracker, just like brotli is a dependency for Node. What matters isn't "who's according-to-Hoyle responsible", what matters is "are you exposed to it".

Not for nothing, but it would have been possible for Firecracker to disable the partial checksum feature this vulnerability exploits. If you wanted to push on the argument a bit, you could say that Firecracker ran virtio-net in an aggressive and possibly unsafe configuration. I wouldn't agree, but it's a colorable argument.

[–] otterley 8 hours ago

You make it sound like uncritically tolerating AI slop is a nonnegotiable price of learning new things.

[–] tptacek 8 hours ago

It is when the "AI slop" is literally the only source of time-sensitive information, as it is here.

[–] otterley 7 hours ago

The time sensitive part containing the patch (which was also sloppy) was published last month; this article is but a PoC.

https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/20260922030310.8684-2-habte.y...

Anyway, I think you keep missing my point. It’s the “uncritical” word that is important here. How work is done is often as important as the work itself. Isn’t that what we teach our children and our junior colleagues? What’s more, expectations should be even higher with seniority.