[TUHS] I'm sure someone has done this already

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Tuesday, July 21st, 2026 at 12:34, David Barto via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> Take the v6, v7, 32v etc Unix Kernel and related software and run Claude
> (or some other AI) on the code to see what it says about potential security
> or software bugs exist.
> 
> I’m sure it would have interesting results.
> 
> 	David

It has been said several times anecdotally that the kernel (as of V6?) had no known bugs during various analyses.  The "On Security" paper demonstrates some clever manipulations of the provided system features to escalate privileges and deny service, but they are not presented as "bugs" so much as malicious-but-legitimate uses of the system.  Granted I've never seen such a "no bugs" assertion about userland, so there could be stuff there that would compromise internal state of a given process.

That might be an interesting criterion to consider though, whether a security problem is an implementation bug or an up-to-that-point legitimate use-case that was just ripe for abuse (such as inode/proc exhaustion or abuse of SUID).

- Matt G.