The stupid thing about the experiment was that it's never been a secret that the kernel is vulnerable to malicious patches. The kernel community understood this long before these academics wasted kernel maintainer time with a silly experiment.

Agree, to me this "research" is like proving grocery stores are vulnerable to theft by sending students to shoplift. If review process guaranteed that vulnerabilities can't pass, wouldn't that mean that the current kernel should be pristinely devoid of them?