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It's absolutely not true that we don't care about KVM host vulnerabilities. KVM survived a good deal of fuzzing with only a handful of trivially fixed NULL-pointer dereference oopses found (including one which turned out to be a bug in a completely different part of the kernel) and no privilege escalations.

Most distros actually make /dev/kvm world-accessible; you are confusing that with virt-manager requiring PolicyKit authentication by default (that's because networking is better integrated if libvirtd runs as root), but for example GNOME Boxes doesn't




That must be a relatively recent change, then - several years ago I think everyone did care quite as much, there just were more vulnerabilities. I'm not insinuating this is because of anyone not caring. :-) It was just a fact that there were a bunch of CVEs.

For instance, Debian stable makes it 664 root:kvm, and a bug I opened a bunch of years ago to change that got wontfixed: https://bugs.debian.org/640328 Is it time to request reconsideration?


Perhaps it is, but mjt (the Debian maintainer) is pretty stubborn...




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