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Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2010 17:20:36 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Steven M. Christey" <coley@...us.mitre.org>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
cc: Guillem Jover <guillem@...ian.org>,
        AnĂ­bal Monsalve Salazar <anibal@...ian.org>,
        "Steven M. Christey" <coley@...us.mitre.org>
Subject: Re: CVE Request -- rpcbind -- Insecure (predictable)
 temporary file use


On Mon, 7 Jun 2010, Josh Bressers wrote:

>> On Fri, 4 Jun 2010, Josh Bressers wrote:
>>
>>> Please use CVE-2010-2061 for this.
>>
>> My read of Guillem's report at
>> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=583435#5 suggests that
>> we might have two distinct issues here:
>>
>> - "*any* user can craft those two files before the daemon has started for
>> the first time, which the daemon will parse."  Nothing to do with
>> symlinks.
>>
>> - symlinks are followed on creation of those files
>>
>
> I'd not thought of these problems like this. You're probably right as CVE
> assignments are for cause, not fix. I was thinking more along the lines of
> the fix (store the files somewhere users can't write to) than the problems
> (which there are certainly two of).

This is the way CVE has evolved over time, to have a preference for the 
core issue (and maybe we're going overboard the more we learn about how to 
identify root causes).

A good counter-example for the notion of counting by fix would be: a web 
application is vulnerable to both XSS and SQL injection on the same input, 
but with a single patch it makes sure that the input is actually numeric. 
The fix sometimes comes into play when the core problem/attack is not 
necessarily known.

Neither approach is better per se, it's just that for CVE we want to be 
reasonably consistent with CVE.

Generally, one guideline I use is: "if the developer fixes X, then could Y 
still be a security problem?"  If so, then they are treated as distinct 
issues.

> Steve, I'll let you make the call, but I'm currently leaning toward two
> IDs.

Me too, I'd suggest assigning an ID from your pool.

- Steve

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