oss-security - Re: Thousands of vulnerabilities, almost no CVEs: OSS-Fuzz

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Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2019 11:53:00 +0200
From: Greg KH <greg@...ah.com>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Thousands of vulnerabilities, almost no CVEs:
 OSS-Fuzz

On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 11:32:05AM +0200, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
> On Sat, 2019-06-15 at 17:57 +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Sat, Jun 15, 2019 at 11:49:03AM -0400, Alex Gaynor wrote:
> > > I do not have a solution to this problem. I wanted to raise awareness of
> > > it, in the hope that it would start a discussion which might come to a
> > > solution.
> > 
> > Why not just do a simple "you must upgrade to the latest version X to
> > fix a bunch of bugs" type of announcement?  No need to worry about crazy
> > backports and cherry-picking, that always fails in the end.
> 
> I sympathize with this view, and I think we need to get better at updating,
> but I really think not all projects can be “safely” just updated to the latest
> version. End-users and IT admins still value stability and regressions is
> still a thing in a lot of cases. And once a regression is introduced, it's not
> always a short time before it's fixed upstream.

So it's a matter of "do I live with all of the bugs that everyone else
knows about and how to exploit, or do I live with a potential
regression?"  That sounds like an easy choice given that the reason you
should be updating is to resolve all of those known bugs :)

Regressions always happen, we are human, but there are ways to mitigate
them (testing, roll-back, preventing developers from not breaking things
on purpose, etc.)  And projects that do not do this type of work to
prevent regressions need to learn that they should change, or users will
go elsewhere.

thanks,

greg k-h

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