[amiga386]

If Google is adopting this, maybe rachelbythebay's vagueposting was ahead of the curve?

I jest; the vagueposting led to uninformed speculation, panic, reddit levels of baseless accusation, and harassment of the developers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43477057

I hope Google's experiment doesn't turn out the same.

[diggan]

> uninformed speculation, panic, reddit levels of baseless accusation, and harassment of the developers

To be fair, it seems like the only way of avoiding something like that is never saying anything publicly. The crowds of the internet eagerly jump into any drama, vague or not, and balloon it regardless.

[eddythompson80]

I remember when heartbleed was the big thing. There were many people digging into the person who committed the bug. Looking for where they lived, worked, and traveled. Many people were so desperate to find something to prove he was a spy.

If you google his name, 80% of the results are articles about how he denying doing that on purpose.

[fn-mote]

> I jest; the vagueposting led to [...]

Resurrecting a 4 month old issue that evaporated in a day or two seems like poor form to me.

Also I believe most of the responsibility for the negative behavior should be assigned to those actually engaging in it, not the initial post. I understand others reasonably disagree (notably about the accusation and harrassment).

Tbh, it sounds like you might have been personally affected? At any rate, I certainly don't condone a mob mentality.

[amiga386]

I stand by what I said at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43492940 - and if you only read one thing, read the harrassment an atop contributor was subjected to by "eslerm": https://github.com/Atoptool/atop/issues/330#issuecomment-275...

I bring it up because of the unmissable parallels. Google are trialling a policy to see what will happen, but this incident shows already what can happen.

RbtB is a trusted blog by the HN crowd, and her vaguepost unexpectedly whipped up hysteria. It was only quelled by a post with more details the next day. Google Project Zero has enormous levels of trust, intends to vaguepost as policy, and not post more details the next day to satisfy the mob.

It does not look good for volunteer maintainers to suffer an entire world of talentless clowns rifling through every commit and asking "is this the bug Project Zero found?"

[tptacek]

The "Rachel By The Bay" blog and Google Project Zero are not reasonable comparands in matters of vulnerability disclosure.

[amiga386]

I think it's a fair illustration of what irresponsible disclosure looks like.

I expect Project Zero will be monitoring carefully; for all their good intentions, this policy trial has the potential to go as badly wrong as the atop disclosure did, for everything they announce.

You can reasonably expect massive, worldwide scrutiny in anything P0 announces has a vulnerability in it without also disclosing the vulnerability, and this extra attention has the potential to overwhelm FOSS maintainers, even if they have fixed the vulnerability and are waiting for coordinated disclosure.

[tptacek]

"Responsible disclosure" is an Orwellian term made up by vendors to coerce vulnerability researchers into working for and on vendor release schedules.

[amiga386]

Did you not see the panicked, stupid, wrong mob that the vaguepost whipped up, with your own eyes? It is very easy to whip up a mob: 1) be well regarded and trusted, and 2) post a vague statement about a specific target (e.g. "you might want to stop running atop") where a lot of people will see it. The mob will then form, start speculating, and a pile of them won't be able to help themselves and will start picking over every single thing in the repository. "Is this the bug?" "No." "Is this the bug?" "No." "This contributor is Jia Tan, isn't he?" "No they are not." and so on.

Maintainers always welcome genuine security reports, and especially love a working PoC. But they don't have time to deal with idiots, spammers, shysters and chancers who submit bullshit reports, or ask for hand-holding to submit what will turn out to be bullshit reports, and they definitely don't have time to engage in idle speculation. It wastes their time, and reduces the time they have to look at what could be genuine reports.

Imagine what would happen if Project Zero posted "you might want to stop running ffmpeg" with no further details. That's effectively what's being proposed. A million idiots descend upon the project with "Hey guys I heard Project Zero found a vulnerability in ffmpeg. How exciting! Is it this free(NULL)?"

There is nothing wrong with responsible and coordinated disclosures, even if vendors take liberties, and yes you should set an upper bound for disclosure. But if your policy is "I will disclose to the public that I found a bug in specific software, but not what the bug is", accept that you are likely to unleash chaos, especially if you are a well-regarded and trusted researcher.

[perching_aix]

Speaking of, whatever came out of that? I don't see any related updates on that blog.

[diggan]

This was published the day after, with the title "Problems with the heap" but the URL makes the context clear: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/03/26/atop/

[perching_aix]

Yeah, I meant since that one.

[amiga386]

A bug matching the details of the vaguepost was found by a third party with no help from Rachel: https://blog.bismuth.sh/blog/bismuth-found-the-atop-bug

> Given the vagueness, we were curious if Bismuth's bug scanning capabilities could find the bug so we let it rip on the code base. 10 minutes later, we had it. Or at least we had a bug which looked and behaved exactly like Rachel described.

> As soon as we figured this out and had something reproducible we moved to responsibly disclose the issue and we emailed Gerlof at 8pm on the 26th.

> Seeing this bug and how it's triggered, I understand Rachel's initial reaction to write a vague "get rid of it" post without going into detail. [...] That said, the internet loves to run wild with speculation and there's a reason we have the responsible disclosure process. For something that's installed as often as Nvidia GPU drivers, it would be prudent to spend the extra few days and have a controlled disclosure. Posting something like that can start off an arms race to find the bug, and if someone malicious were to reproduce and exploit it first, they get free reign to take over affected systems until it's patched. Yes, sounding the alarm might cause people to uninstall it, but there's plenty of places where it will remain, giving malicious actors incentive to go for it. But with a coordinated disclosure, the arms race never starts, and systems are patched before anyone realizes there was an issue.

The atop maintainer fixed the bug on March 29th, and also changed the behaviour of atop to _not_ connect to its helper daemons by default: https://github.com/Atoptool/atop/commit/542b7f7ac52926ca2721... ... and released it as atop v2.11.1 on April 5th: https://github.com/Atoptool/atop/releases/tag/v2.11.1

There has been nothing on Rachel's blog about this topic since the vaguepost and vaguepost followup.

The CVE (https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-31160) is still incorrect, and there's no indication who requested it. It says that versions "0 - 2.11.0" are affected, this is untrue, because the atopgpud (and support in atop for reading from it) was introduced in version 2.4.0 ("The vulnerability is present since the introduction of 'atopgpud' in atop 2.4.0." per https://www.atoptool.nl/downloadatop.php)