Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gucci-on-fleek 42 days ago
I'm somewhat skeptical here, because I notified the FreeBSD security team of a vulnerability a few years ago, and I never got a response, even after a follow-up email a few weeks later. To be fair, my report was about a non-core component, and the vulnerability wouldn't be very easy to exploit, but Debian, OpenBSD, SUSE, and Gentoo all patched it within a week [0].

That being said, I'm not suggesting that anyone should judge an entire OS based off of how they handle a single minor report, since everything else that I've seen suggests that FreeBSD takes security reports quite seriously. But then you could also use this same argument for the Linux kernel bug, since it's pretty rare for a patch to be mismanaged like this there too :)

[0]: https://www.maxchernoff.ca/p/luatex-vulnerabilities#timeline

2 comments

While not receiving a response isn't ideal, I note that we actually have two secteams: secteam@ and ports-secteam@; something like luatex should go to the latter, but their level of activity has been kind of hit or miss in my experience. Curating security issues in ports is kind of hard due to the size of it and we probably more often than not end up getting hit with patching things a little after disclosure because of it.
Linux Kernel doesn’t differentiate between security bugs and other bugs, which is the main complaint here I think. They have the same process.

So the issue is bigger than the mishandling of a single issue, it’s a fundamental process issue around security for one of the most impactful projects in the entire space.