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by encoderer 3526 days ago
Bitwarden is a password manager? And their engineer is asking, after being told a hint of serious security issues in their framework, to just forget about it and let them publish?

That's an interesting approach.

2 comments

No, the engineer is asking for more information so that he can determine if the application is truly affected by some unpublished Angular vulnerability or if Mozilla is just being too aggressive with their ban hammer because someone said "Angular 1.x was no longer being officially supported", which is false.
I think encoderer was referring to https://github.com/mozilla/addons-linter/issues/1000#issueco..., where the engineer asks, "Is there any possible way for us to get around this ban?"
Followed up immediately with "Are all parts of Angular affected?" The charitable interpretation is that he is asking "is there a safe subset of Angular that we can use instead of a blanket ban?".
Yeah that's a fair (and more charitable) way to read that. But it's also not that clear. He spends a lot of time worrying about how much time they've spent on their extension.

Why no "woah, our other angular apps could be affected, is there any safe subset of angular 1?"

There aren't many products where security matters THAT much. I'd hope that the people working on password managers have a total security first mindset.

Which is referring to the possibility that the application may not be using some feature that is affected by this supposed top secret vulnerability.
If you're the engineer in question (since your comment history suggests you work at Bitwarden), you should explicitly state that and explain that ignoring any vulnerability was not the intent of your comment.
Thanks. I updated the comment.
It's good you updated the Github comment, but you should also consider explicitly stating your affiliation when relevant when commenting on Hacker News in the future.

If you had done in this case, it would have immediately cleared up encoderer's questions about your Github comment.

It's not doing much for your reputation (or that of your employer) that you still haven't clarified whether you are the engineer or not - even after deliberately referring to yourself in the third person and being called out for it.
It is strange. On the other hand there's something suspicious here. Some things clearly aren't being communicated properly.
Yeah, definitely odd.

"We banned any package containing Angular 1.x. We received a security report. One that we were asked not to share with you, one that we didn't even mention, we just went ahead and implemented the ban, didn't tell anybody."