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In that case, automatic updates likely need different permission levels. What exactly is allowed to be updated automatically?


... well, yes, yes of course. And if I try to be serious on a late Friday night (it's almost 20:00 here), the obvious solutions is to have something like eBPF in/for the Linux kernel (which has a verifier[0]).

And security vendors should follow "secure by design" principles. Yes, I know a try-fucking-catch might be too advanced, and uh oh kernel code is hard because unwinding is costly. But guess what else is also not cheap. (Okay, I seriousness failed.) But still. This is fair and square in the "this should never happen" scenario. It's an automatically downloaded plugin or whatever. (CS can call it "content update", but von Neumann is already calling FedEx to send them a pallet of industrial grade bitchslap.) And if the plugin loader cannot gracefully fail plugin loading, then it should obviously come with the appropriate audiovisual cues[1] so sysadmins know what to expect.

[0] https://docs.kernel.org/bpf/verifier.html

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv-2dzD9F10




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