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by fargle 840 days ago
"burn them down" is kind of a brilliant political move.

on one hand, it's true to the "all bugs are security bugs (and the converse is obviously true)" position.

on the other hand, it will demonstrably cause hassles for what i term the "checklist security" people. "oh noes we only have the budget for N CVEs per release and we must have NONE > $arbitrary-number". and so that's a very good thing because checklist-security like that is far worse than nothing at all.

on the the other-other hand, in more legitimate, well engineered downstream user, a CVE for every bug may conversely actually help real security. "all" you have to do is evaluate every single potential security flaw's real actual applicability and impact for your use case. and if you can't afford that - faking it with a check-the-box mentality is no substitute. but maybe you can afford that? if so better data will probably help, not hurt.

finally, the other concrete improvement is that the people closest to the product will be able to more accurately judge the CVE score and more quickly correct outliers. a local privilege escalation that requires enhanced privileges to execute is not an 8. i'd much rather have 1000 CVEs with appropriate scores than 10 that are massively overrated and stupid. of course, a simple one-dimensional metric is hogwash anyway, but - baby steps.