[openasocket]

... because if you don't and someone malicious also discovers this vulnerability they can use it to do bad things? If I can get a vulnerability patched before it can be exploited, I can potentially prevent a hacker from stealing people's identity, credit card numbers, private data, etc. To have that opportunity and not act seems irresponsible.

I must be misunderstanding. Would you mind expanding on this more?

[tptacek]

You are not misunderstanding. I do not in the general case have a duty to correct other people's mistakes. The people deploying broken software have a duty to do whatever they can not to allow its flaws to compromise their users and customers. Merely learning something new about the software they use does not transfer that obligation onto me.

I would personally in almost every case report vulnerabilities I discovered. But not in every case (for instance: I refused to report the last CryptoCat flaw I discovered, though I did publicly and repeatedly warn that I'd found something grave). More importantly: my own inclination to report doesn't bind on every other vulnerability researcher.

[openasocket]

Well, I'm glad you do report the vulnerabilities you find. Maybe it's my own naive, optimistic worldview, but I profoundly disagree with your stance that a researcher is not obligated to report. I think it is a matter of public safety. If you found out a particular restaurant was selling food with dangerously high levels of lead, aren't you obligated to tell someone, anyone for the public good? If you don't, you aren't as culpable as the restaurant serving this food, but that's still a lot of damage you could have prevented at no real cost to yourself.

I understand morality is subjective, but that's my 2 cents on the matter.

EDIT: about the vulnerabilities you didn't disclose, I really can't understand why not. Why not just send an email to the maintainer: "hey, when I do X I cause a buffer overflow"? You don't even have to help them fix it. You probably won't answer this, but can you tell me why you wouldn't disclose a vulnerability?

[tptacek]

I do not report all the vulnerabilities I find, as I just said.

I confess to being a bit mystified as to how work I do on my own time, uncompensated by anyone else, which work does not create new vulnerabilities but instead merely informs me as to their existence, somehow creates an obligation for me to act on behalf of the vendors who managed to create those vulnerabilities in the first place.

Perhaps you have not had the pleasure of trying to report a vulnerability, losing several hours just trying to find the correct place to send the vulnerability, being completely unable to find a channel with which to send the vulnerability without putting the plaintext for it on the Internet in email or some dopey web form, only to get a response from first-line tech support asking for a license or serial number so they can provide customer support.

Clearly, you have not had the experience of being threatened with lawsuits for reporting vulnerabilities --- not in software running on someone else's servers (which, absent a bug bounty, you do not in the US have a legal right to test) but on software you download and run and test on your own machine. I have had that experience.

No. Finding vulnerabilities does not obligate someone to report them. I can understand why you wish it did. But it does not.

[openasocket]

I see you point about it being overly difficult to report vulnerabilities, especially legal threats, that seriously sucks. I guess I believe you have an obligation to make some effort to disclose, but if a project is just irresponsible and won't fix their shit, or will try to sue you, it's out of your hands.

[tptacek]

Somehow my doing work on my own time creates an obligation for me to do more work on behalf of others.

Can't I just flip this around on you and say you have an ethical obligation to spend some of your time looking for vulnerabilities? If you started looking, you'd find some. Why do you get to free-ride on my work by refusing to scrutinize the stuff you run?

[openasocket]

> Somehow my doing work on my own time creates an obligation for me to do more work on behalf of others.

To some small extent, yes, though how much work is up for debate. Maintainer's email and PGP public key is right there on the website? Yeah, I think you're obligated. No email you can find, no way to contact them, or are just outright hostile? No, I think you shouldn't have to deal with that.

But I feel like you agree with that, though maybe not in those exact words. After all, you've had to jump through all kinds of hoops to disclose vulnerabilities, been threatened with lawsuits for doing the right thing, and yet you still practice responsible disclosure in almost every case in spite of the burden of effort and potential risk. Aren't you doing it because you think disclosure is the right think to do? That's all I mean by obligation.

EDIT: sorry, not "responsible disclosure," "cooperative disclosure" or whatever term you want to use for disclosing the vulnerability to the maintainer.

[big_surprise]

You assume that your own research machine can't be compromised, nor are the communication channels of the organization at fault.

So, it won't be fixed.

Hopefully only one or two people know about the same flaw you found...

Oh, but you would know ahead of time if concrete physical harm could possibly come to the victim of an accident?

Well good for you! You should probably be in charge of defending all infosec research, since apparently you can't be hacked.

[lawnchair_larry]

This is a fascinating exchange. Now I wonder how much of the general population, or even the tech-but-not-security population thinks like this.

[tptacek]

To your second question: because some projects are fundamentally irresponsible, and providing vulnerability reports to them means making an engineering contribution, which decreases the likelihood that the project will fail.