A fuzzy issue of responsible disclosure

If I were an attacker who had compromised the supply chain of a hardware vendor to the extent I could modify the content of their driver CDs then using a malformed filesystem to exploit some kernel bug would definitely not be my first choice! This is linux, so it's unlikely those drivers would be signed anyway (as non-free drivers can't be really be signed in a way that chains them to anything the kernel trusts) so I'd just modify the drivers outright.

If I were trying to defend against such an attack I would sign the drivers, or the image itself, with a key that chains to something posted publicly someplace moderately unlikely to also be compromised by the attacker, but I bet that would save a pretty small percentage of users who would otherwise be pwned by such an attack.