“Following the recent string of security-related kernel issues,
the question was raised on the lkml what formal effort is being
made to audit new patches. Long time Linux kernel guru Alan Cox
noted two trends that he considers positive. First, that ‘tools
like coverity and sparse are significantly increasing the number of
flaws found,’ often finding flaws that have been in the code a long
time. Second, Alan noted that security holes tend to come in bursts
all related to the same type of problem. He explains, ‘if you plot
things like ‘buffer overflow’ ‘structure passed to user space not
cleaned’ ‘maths overflow check error’ against time you’ll see they
show definite patterns with spikes decaying at different rates
towards zero.’ Alan added, ‘there are also people other than Linus
who read every single changeset. I do for one…'”