[aorth]

Someone filed a bug report on a project I work on, saying that it was a security vulnerability that we don't prefix cell values with a single quote (') when the cell content contains certain values like an equal sign (=). They said this can cause Excel to evaluate the content and potentially run unsafe code.

I responded that this was Excel's problem, not ours, and that nobody would assign a CVE to our product for such a "vulnerability". How naive I was! They forwarded me several such CVEs assigned to products that create CSVs that are "unsafe" for Excel.

Terrible precedent. Ridiculous security theater.

[evnp]

There are a lot of these sorts of bug reports running around, to the point that Google's bug bounty program has classified them as invalid: https://bughunters.google.com/learn/invalid-reports/google-p...

I agree with the characterization ("security theater") of these bug reports. The problem is that the intentions of these reports don't make the potential risk less real, depending on the setting, and I worry that the "You're just looking for attention" reaction (a very fair one!) leads to a concerning downplaying of this issue across the web.

As a library author, I agree this very well may not be something that needs to be addressed. But as someone working in a company responsible for customers, employees, and their sensitive information, disregarding this issue disregards the reality of the tools these people will invariably use, downstream of software we _are_ responsible for. Aiming to make this downstream activity as safe as possible seems like a worthy goal.

[yrro]

The next version of CVSS needs to add a metric for these kind of bullshit non-vulnerabilities so that we can ignore them at source.