Linux Kernel Vulnerability Dataset

125,183 bug-fix pairs mined from 20 years of Linux kernel git history (2005-2025).

Dataset

vuln_commits_full.csv contains:

Column	Description
fixing_commit	SHA of the commit that fixed the bug
introducing_commit	SHA of the commit that introduced the bug
lifetime_days	Days between introduction and fix
subsystem	Kernel subsystem (networking, drivers, gpu, etc.)
bug_type	Detected bug type (use-after-free, null-deref, etc.)
fixing_date / introducing_date	Timestamps
fix_author / intro_author	Who wrote each commit
files_changed, insertions, deletions	Diff stats
cve_id	CVE ID if mentioned (nullable)
cc_stable	Whether fix was tagged for stable backport

Key Findings

Metric	Value
Total bug-fix pairs	125,183
Average bug lifetime	2.1 years
Median bug lifetime	0.7 years
Longest-lived bug	20.7 years (ethtool buffer overflow)
Bugs hiding 5+ years	13.5%

By Subsystem

Subsystem	Avg Lifetime
CAN bus	4.2 years
SCTP	4.0 years
IPv4	3.6 years
USB	3.5 years
Netfilter	2.9 years
GPU	1.4 years
BPF	1.1 years

By Bug Type

Bug Type	Avg Lifetime
Race condition	5.1 years
Integer overflow	3.9 years
Use-after-free	3.2 years
Memory leak	3.1 years
Null dereference	2.2 years

Scripts

• cve_miner.py - Extract Fixes: tags from kernel git history
• extract_features.py - Extract 51 features from commit diffs for ML training

Usage

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_csv('vuln_commits_full.csv')

# Average lifetime by subsystem
df.groupby('subsystem')['lifetime_days'].mean().sort_values(ascending=False)

# Bug type distribution
df['bug_type'].value_counts()

HuggingFace

This dataset is also available on HuggingFace with a Data Studio viewer:

🤗 huggingface.co/datasets/quguanni/kernel-vuln-dataset

Blog Post

Kernel bugs hide for 2 years on average. Some hide for 20.

Citation

@dataset{qu2026kernelvuln,
  author = {Qu, Jenny Guanni},
  title = {Linux Kernel Vulnerability Dataset},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://github.com/quguanni/kernel-vuln-data}
}

License

MIT

Contact

Jenny Guanni Qu - jenny@pebblebed.com