Stable Linux releases lack existing security fixes because backporting them is time-consuming and often thankless work. We’re using Codex to reduce the backporting process time from days to hours per fix, empowering human patch reviewers to rapidly submit fixes for critical software like Ubuntu Long Term Support, Fedora, and the Linux kernel. By October 29, our project helped deliver fixes for 149 distinct CVEs into stable Linux kernel releases, and several fixes to Fedora and Ubuntu packages.
Deploying fixes to older software requires multiple steps, including adapting fixes to older code, checking dependencies, and ensuring the fix did not introduce new bugs. A single task (like tracking down a bug in a bad commit) can take a week or more of effort that no one sees or appreciates.
Our Codex workflow has reduced the human effort required to prepare and review fixes. Excluding project-specific initial setup, preparing and reviewing a straightforward backport takes about 30 minutes of human attention; a more involved case can take around three hours. The workflow’s approach is twofold: agents perform activities like identifying missing fixes, adapting patches, assembling validation evidence, running tests, and preparing submission packets, while engineers review the patches and submit them to maintainers.
Those estimates only cover patch preparation and review; regression testing and maintainer acceptance remain essential. But the reduced human commitment makes a substantial class of neglected security work practical to undertake. The patch backlog is large, but we now have a practical way to work through it.
Do we have to decide between stability and security?
Software has bugs, and we try to fix them when we can. The first place the fix happens is in the latest version of the software. Unfortunately, that’s often the only place where the fix happens.
Backporting is the process of getting a fix from the latest source code to older versions. Fixes for big-name, critical bugs are indeed often backported quickly. But for many other bugs, the backporting process never happens. It is easy to understand why: software packaging is often done by volunteers who are already overworked, and backporting is frustrating, thankless work that gets little credit or publicity. For open source projects staffed by teams of volunteers, backports are (understandably) a low priority. As XFS developer Dave Chinner once described, this work is “effectively a full time job” that simply goes undone without sufficient resources.
The lack of backports is a problem because almost no one runs the latest and greatest version of software that’s been freshly built with today’s code changes. People overwhelmingly prefer slightly older, more tested software packaged in “long term stable” releases. For example, about 95% of Ubuntu Linux installations are of the Long Term Support (LTS) variety. When looking at installed Linux kernel packages from Debian’s popcon, the overwhelming majority are based on older stable trees:
Figure 1: A Codex-generated graph of recently installed kernel packages from Debian’s popcon. The overwhelming majority (about 96%) are older, stable releases, and not the latest kernel series.
Users are faced with a decision: they can either stick with a stable, familiar version of software that has security flaws, or upgrade to a newer version that fixes those flaws but introduces other changes and new features they may not want.
Many people purposely do not update to new releases; I think this is entirely justified and normal end-user behavior. Just recently, I updated my Mac to macOS 27 and couldn’t use a printer that had worked flawlessly for years (until Codex wrote a new, compatible printer driver). Similar situations effectively require older software.
We should not have to make a choice between stability and security.
Thousands of known CVEs lack stable-branch fixes
A swarm of cyber-capable AI agents can cut through a network of stable, known-vulnerable software like a hot knife through butter. The scale of the problem is such that the software you are currently running likely contains unfixed security bugs that can be exploited by modern AI agents. As AI-assisted bug hunting makes it easier to identify vulnerabilities in older code, reducing this backlog becomes increasingly important. This is not merely theoretical. A fix for the latest high-profile bug, CVE-2026-98432 (a critical remotely exploitable flaw in the Linux TCP stack), still had not landed in distribution kernels weeks after being patched upstream. That bug is high-profile enough that it will soon be fixed everywhere. But fixes for more obscure bugs never get backported. I saw this during my sandbox escape research, and an old vulnerability in stable software was used as a part of the recently disclosed OpenAI hack.
Let’s quantify the scale of the missing backport problem. To make counting simple, we can limit ourselves to known
[…]
Content was trimmed to protect the source. Please visit the original article for the full text.
Read the original article: