University banned from contributing to Linux kernel after intentionally submitting vulnerable code

A statement from the University of Minnesota Department of Computer Science & Engineering:

Leadership in the University of Minnesota Department of Computer Science & Engineering learned today about the details of research being conducted by one of its faculty members and graduate students into the security of the Linux Kernel. The research method used raised serious concerns in the Linux Kernel community and, as of today, this has resulted in the University being banned from contributing to the Linux Kernel.

We take this situation extremely seriously. We have immediately suspended this line of research. We will investigate the research method and the process by which this research method was approved, determine appropriate remedial action, and safeguard against future issues, if needed. We will report our findings back to the community as soon as practical.

This story is crazy. It turns out researchers from the University of Minnesota were intentionally trying to introduce vulnerabilities into the Linux kernel as part of some research study. This was, of course, discovered, and kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman immediately banned the entire university from submitting any code to the Linux kernel. Replying to the researcher in question, Kroah-Hartman wrote:

You, and your group, have publicly admitted to sending known-buggy patches to see how the kernel community would react to them, and published a paper based on that work.

Now you submit a new series of obviously-incorrect patches again, so what am I supposed to think of such a thing?

They obviously were _NOT_ created by a static analysis tool that is of any intelligence, as they all are the result of totally different patterns, and all of which are obviously not even fixing anything at all. So what am I supposed to think here, other than that you and your group are continuing to experiment on the kernel community developers by sending such nonsense patches?

[...]

Our community does not appreciate being experimented on, and being tested" by submitting known patches that are either do nothing on purpose, or introduce bugs on purpose. If you wish to do work like this, I suggest you find a different community to run your experiments on, you are not welcome here.

Because of this, I will now have to ban all future contributions from your University and rip out your previous contributions, as they were obviously submitted in bad-faith with the intent to cause problems.

This is obviously the only correct course of action, and the swift response by the university is the right one.