[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:39:00 -0700
From: "Timothy D. Morgan" <tmorgan@...curity.com>
To: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
CC: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: CVE-2012-0037: libraptor - XXE in RDF/XML File Interpretation
(Multiple office products affected)
Hi again,
>> 2012-02-02 Notified OpenWall "distros" mailing list again, due to previous
>> technical problems.
>
> IIRC, the "technical problems" being referred to here were an attachment
> not being re-encrypted to list members, so they only had partial info
> until this point - essentially just the fact that there's a
> vulnerability in those products, but with no detail; given the extra
> embargo time (not needed by distro vendors) this may actually be good.
> The list setup is a bit picky about what encrypted message formats it
> supports (besides plaintext, they may be PGP/MIME or PGP inline, but
> they can't have individual pre-encrypted attachments - this has since
> been clarified on the wiki).
Actually, I didn't manually encrypt the attachment, but my mail client's PGP
plugin likely did the equivalent. PGP/MIME is definitely preferred, but since
certain Windows-based mail clients utterly fail at interpreting it properly, I
often fall back to old style PGP when sending messages to strangers. I think
your updated text helps.
> "If you have not yet notified upstream projects/developers of the
> affected software, other affected distro vendors, and/or affected Open
> Source projects, you may want to do so before notifying one of these
> mailing lists in order to ensure that these other parties are OK with
> the maximum embargo period that would apply (and if not, then you may
> have to delay your notification to the mailing list), unless you're
> confident you'd choose to ignore their preference anyway and disclose
> the issue publicly soon as per the policy stated here."
You may want to re-word this a little to make it utterly clear to those who
don't take the time to think about it. Perhaps something like "If expect
upstream vendors to require more than 14-19 days to develop a fix, establish a
release date with them prior to notifying this list". You could also break it
down in to step-by-step bullets. That page has grown much larger now and it is
tempting to skim...
> Also, apparently it is still common practice to delay documenting
> security fixes in office products as such - that is, since releases take
> so long to prepare and test, they're first built with security fixes
> included but undocumented, they're even made publicly available for
> testing, and only then they're finalized and the security fixes become
> publicly known as such. This too is or should hopefully be a practice
> of the past as it relates to some other software, and let's just pretend
> that I naively hope it will be gone for these products (which is closely
> related to being able to fix security issues and push such fixes to the
> users quicker).
I agree with you that releasing undocumented fixes carries significant risks.
It's become clear to me that the LO/OO projects have a ways to go when it comes
to release engineering.
tim
Powered by blists - more mailing lists
Please check out the
Open Source Software Security Wiki, which is counterpart to this
mailing list.
Confused about mailing lists and their use?
Read about mailing lists on Wikipedia
and check out these
guidelines on proper formatting of your messages.
