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Xen Patches 7-Year-Old Bug That Shattered Hypervisor Security (arstechnica.com)
williamyf writes: ArsTechinca, The Register, and other outlets are reporting that today the XEN project patched a vulnerability in the ParaVirtualized VMs that allowed a guest to access the control OS of the hypervisor. Qubes researchers wrote: "On the other hand, it is really shocking that such a bug has been lurking in the core of the hypervisor for so many years. In our opinion the Xen project should rethink their coding guidelines and try to come up with practices and perhaps additional mechanisms that would not let similar flaws to plague the hypervisor ever again".
The truth is nobody uses para-virtualized VMs anymore. EC2 which was the last bastion for pv xen stopped using it a couple of years ago and moved entirely to hvm model. I'm not even sure that the latest Linux kernel support are compiled with Xen PV support. If you looked at the kernel code for PV XEN support you know what the mess that was so good riddance. You need to understand what PV mode means for hypervisors: a kernel must be specifically modified to talk to a hypervisor so instead of performing a privileged CPU instruction it would call a Hypervisor provided function. I'm sure there were tons of security issues with that approach and many still exists. Anyway PV model is not relevant anymore since Intel introduced hardware virtualization on the CPU. It was introduced to to improve perfromance of VMs but it's not relevant anymore
ESR didn't say "given enough eyeballs, no bugs exist."
He said they are -shallow-. "The fix will be obvious to someone". That is, you won't spend a month trying to to figure out exactly why foo sometimes conflicts with widget - with with several people looking at the source (not just the output of the binary), someone will more quickly see why foo conflicts with widget and how to fix it.
It looks like in this case it was about 48 hours or so to characterize the problem, agree on the proper fix, code it, test, patch the major public clouds, and release it publicly. Guessing that patching the public clouds took 24 hours, that's about 24 hours for understanding the problem, discussing it fixing it, and testing. Not bad. Here's a quote from CATB with the context of the "bugs are shallow" part:
---- ... if any serious bug proved intractable. Linus was behaving as though he believed something like this:
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
Or, less formally, ``Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.'' I dub this: ``Linus's Law''.
My original formulation was that every problem ``will be transparent to somebody''. Linus demurred that the person who understands and fixes the problem is not necessarily or even usually the person who first characterizes it. ``Somebody finds the problem,'' he says, ``and somebody else understands it.
----
It's about bugs not being intractable - they aren't extremely hard to figure out, "the fix will be obvious to someone". That doesn't mean they never existed.