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Date: Wed, 6 May 2009 11:40:16 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Steven M. Christey" <coley@...us.mitre.org>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: oss-security CNA
On Mon, 27 Apr 2009, Josh Bressers wrote:
> I think having an oss-security CNA that is not MITRE would be useful, and
> hopefully would alleviate some of the pressure MITRE currently feels. There
> would of course be collisions from time to time, but that's likely going to
> still cause less pain than the current model provides.
>
> If this idea is appealing to MITRE, we could start working out some of the
> details.
I agree that this idea is worth exploring in detail. One complicating
factor is that various vulnerability databases have started monitoring
this list, so we might create a CVE from our internal db-monitoring stream
at the same time that a CNA performs an assignment.
Many months ago, I privately conferred with Mark Cox on this challenge for
MITRE, and he suggested something like a well-formed request that fills in
details that are relevant for CVEs. Such details are often missing from
the oss-security requests. (They are often missing from Bugtraq and
milw0rm posts too, but those are usually pretty simple bug types.)
I don't know if a form-like request would always work, but it would make
things more efficient. As one example - the distros all use their own
local version numbering schemes, or at least they maintain different
versions. This sometimes make it into a CVE description (causing
inaccuracies we might have to fix later) or otherwises forces some
research to determine the likely upstream version. For Linux kernel
issues, I often have to sift through git commit logs to guess that if a
patch was committed on date X, and a new kernel was made on X+3, that
maybe that's the fixed kernel version - at least for the 2.6 kernel
anyway.
As Jericho said, open source poses a special challenge because there is
often a large amount of details we may want to include in descriptions.
Especially for things like the Linux kernel, CVE often has more specific
details than any other data source out there. This is expensive to
generate, but avoiding such details when they're available potentially
leads to duplicates or confusion. My comments of the past few weeks are a
reflection of the CVE team's larger efforts for defining a process that's
efficient but still fulfills CVE's primary role for its primary
audience(s).
Thanks all,
Steve
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