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by elif 1076 days ago
a lack of security functionality by default is categorically a vulnerability. you are mincing words.

having a redis exposed to the internet is a vulnerability, even though theoretically you could use lua scripting yourself to do some kind of authentication for every request. same stretch of logic applies there...

3 comments

Ehhhh not convinced that's a fair comparison.

In Chalk (node.js library for terminal coloring via escape codes) we had a "vulnerability" reported to us that inputs to our library that had malicious escapes were passed through and thus our library allowed RCE.

Never in the docs did we claim we sanitized inputs, nor should we - the net result is that the library would be slower and bulkier for the 99% case and protect only a fraction of the remainder from any sort of real attack - and those users should probably be doing their own sanitization anyway.

Is that really our fault? No, not really. I don't think that if mailgun doesn't support it, should it be considered a vulnerability. GP had it right - could be a cool feature but this is not some oversight unless they market that as being a security measure.

Agreed. I think the point here is that what % of Mailgun users will be doing this additional processing? I suspect it's basically 0%.

Why? It's not outlined in their specs, their sales copy implies they are handling it, and sensible headers are sometimes there which is extra misleading.

The mouse and keyboard are a vulnerability.

This definition makes the word pretty meaningless. I'd stick to things not doing what they promise to do. To do email doesn't require handling these other, tacked on later, protocols as well. They probably also fail to scan for Nigerian king scams but that isn't really a problem email solves so we don't fault them for it.