[john_strinlai]

>publicly sharing the exploit was irresponsible

they did it in the established industry standard way that probably every single security researcher you can think of follows (for good reason, i would add).

whoever did the marketing on "responsible disclosure" was a genius.

tptacek says it much better than me: ""Responsible disclosure" is an Orwellian term cooked up between @Stake and Microsoft and other large vendors to coerce researchers into synchronizing with vendor release schedules."

[Denvercoder9]

In my world, responsibility is not just checking a box of following industry practice. Responsibility, as Wikipedia puts it on their social responsibility page, is working together with others for the benefit of the community. And yes, sometimes that's a bit larger burden than would ideally be the case. It's an imperfect world, after all -- and let's not forget the disclosure as it happened also placed a larger burden than ideal on people scrambling to patch.

And it's not as if I'm asking for a lot of effort. One mail to the security team of a popular distro "hey, we have found this LPE that we'll release with exploit next week, it's patched upstream already in this commit, but you don't seem to have picked it up" would likely have been enough.

[da_chicken]

No.

The problem is that vendors and developers have repeatedly shown that if you give them an inch, they take a mile. Look at exactly what happened with BlueHammer this month. The security researcher went full disclosure because Microsoft didn't listen to their reports.

Disclosure is vital. It's essential. Because the truth is, if a security researcher has found it, it's extremely likely that it's already been found by either black hats or by state actors. Ignorance is not actually protection from exploitation.

The security researcher also has a responsibility to the general public that is still actively using vulnerable software in ignorance. They need to be protected from vendor and developer negligence as well as from exploits. And the only way to protect yourself from an exploit that hasn't yet been patched is to know that it is there.

[Denvercoder9]

The situation with e.g. BlueHammer is fundamentally different: there, the only party that could act on it (Microsoft) ignored them. In this case, the parties that could act on it weren't notified at all.

I'm also not proposing delaying the disclosure to the general public at all. They already waited 30 days with that, that's fine. Just look a bit further than your checklist of only contacting upstream, and send a mail to the distributions if they haven't picked it up a week or two before.

[tptacek]

Downstream vulnerability disclosure is a negotiation between the downstreams and the upstreams. It is not the job of a vulnerability researcher to map this out perfectly (or at all).

[sersi]

Yes and that's why the current system where security researchers are expected to reach out to the distro mailing list is flawed and instead there should be a defined pipeline for the kernel security team to give a heads up.

[throw0101a]

> The problem is that vendors and developers have repeatedly shown that if you give them an inch, they take a mile.

[citation needed]

Is there any evidence that Linux distros (specifically) act in this way? Or a particular distro?

[john_strinlai]

>[citation needed]

there is ~3 decades of citations you can look at, spread out over every security mailing list, security conference, etc. that you can think of.

one decent start is https://projectzero.google/vulnerability-disclosure-faq.html...

"Prior to Project Zero our researchers had tried a number of different disclosure policies, such as coordinated vulnerability disclosure. [...] "We used this model of disclosure for over a decade, and the results weren’t particularly compelling. Many fixes took over six months to be released, while some of our vulnerability reports went unfixed entirely! We were optimistic that vendors could do better, but we weren’t seeing the improvements to internal triage, patch development, testing, and release processes that we knew would provide the most benefit to users.

[...]

While every vulnerability disclosure policy has certain pros and cons, Project Zero has concluded that a 90-day disclosure deadline policy is currently the best option available for user security. Based on our experiences with using this policy for multiple years across thousands of vulnerability reports, we can say that we’re very satisfied with the results.

[...]

For example, we observed a 40% faster response time from one software vendor when comparing bugs reported against the same target over a 7-year period, while another software vendor doubled the regularity of their security updates in response to our policy."

>Linux distros (specifically) act in this way

carving out special exceptions based on nebulous criteria is a bad idea. 90+30 is what has been settled on, and mostly works.

[da_chicken]

Really?

Because I would call a situation where the development team fails to appreciate the severity of a security vulnerability and has an established procedure that requires the researcher and not the kernel team to communicate with downstream users is already a major failure of process. Security is not just patching the vulnerability, and it seems that the Linux kernel developers or the Linux kernel security team does not understand that.

This is the result of that failure.

If this were any other software, we'd be here with pitchforks and torches. The researcher gave the developers timed disclosure, and even waited until after the developers had patched the issue. And... it's still a problem.