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Date: Thu, 4 May 2023 11:06:01 -0700
From: Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith@...cle.com>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com, Sam Bull <9m199i@...bull.org>
Subject: Re: Perl's HTTP::Tiny has insecure TLS cert default,
affecting CPAN.pm and other modules
On 5/4/23 10:15, Sam Bull wrote:
> On Wed, 2023-05-03 at 15:54 -0400, David A. Wheeler wrote:
>>> On May 3, 2023, at 3:15 PM, Reid Sutherland <reid@...rddimension.net> wrote:
>>> Who actually decides when something receives a CVE?
>>
>> There's a process for assigning CVEs. Anyone who wants to be able to assign CVEs - that
>> is, to become a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) - has to follow various processes.
>>
>>> This can be used to defame projects and products as in this case.
>>
>> Identifying a vulnerability does not defame a project.
>
> But, reporting a CVE where there is no vulnerability wastes a lot of time for the project
> maintainers, as we had last year with this CVE:
> https://github.com/aio-libs/aiohttp/issues/6801
>
> As far as we could tell, it seems a random user reported a DoS vulnerability to Github
> (maybe?) and got a CVE assigned, with no reproducer or any evidence of a vulnerability,
> and just a link to an issue which was never considered a security issue by anybody. None
> of us involved with the project were notified of the report either, we learnt about the
> CVE from other users asking us about it.
>
> It took months to get that satisfactorily revoked and stop getting users asking us about
> it (apparently there's no standardised way to tell if CVEs are revoked, so seems DB
> maintainers have to remove them on a case-by-case basis, making the process much longer).
> So, something somewhere is not fully working in the process.
The CVE process is designed with a primary goal of simply providing a unique id
for each claimed vulnerability - it's intended to not have much deeper meaning
than creating a UUID. There is no requirement that the claimed vulnerability
be well described, proven, accepted, fixed, or anything else beyond not being a
duplicate of an existing CVE entry.
Unfortunately, many CVE consumers assume a far greater level of meaning to CVEs
than the CVE project intends by them.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith@...cle.com
Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris
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