Re: [PATCH 1/1] MAINTAINERS: introduce cve or security quotient field

[Cornelia Huck <cohuck@redhat.com>]

On Tue, 14 Jul 2020 14:06:31 +0530
P J P <ppandit@redhat.com> wrote:

> From: Prasad J Pandit <pjp@fedoraproject.org>
> 
> QEMU supports numerous virtualisation and emulation use cases.
> It also offers many features to support guest's function(s).
> 
> All of these use cases and features are not always security relevant.
> Because some maybe used in trusted environments only. Some may still
> be in experimental stage. While other could be very old and not
> used or maintained actively.
> 
> For security bug analysis we generally consider use cases wherein
> QEMU is used in conjunction with the KVM hypervisor, which enables
> guest to use hardware processor's virtualisation features.
> 
> The CVE (or Security or Trust) Quotient field tries to capture this
> sensitivity pertaining to a feature or section of the code.
> 
> It indicates whether a potential issue should be treated as a security
> one OR it could be fixed as a regular non-security bug.
> 
> Suggested-by: Daniel P. Berrange <berrange@redhat.com>
> Signed-off-by: Prasad J Pandit <pjp@fedoraproject.org>
> ---
>  MAINTAINERS | 324 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  1 file changed, 324 insertions(+)
> 

(...)

> @@ -87,6 +95,7 @@ S390 general architecture support
>  M: Cornelia Huck <cohuck@redhat.com>
>  M: Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>
>  S: Supported
> +C: High

Just to reiterate what others have previously stated:

The granularity in MAINTAINERS and how it is organized does not really
work well with what you are trying to do with this classification.

If I pick just this entry as an example: It covers *all* s390x-related
code, and this covers both things like support for protected
virtualization (definitely critical) and virtio-9p-ccw (definitely not
critical). It is important that somebody is looking after s390x overall
(hence the "Supported" state), but not all s390x-related code is
equally critical.

I see the main purpose of the MAINTAINERS file to find the right
contacts for an area; other approaches like tagging of devices and
features seem to be better suited for figuring out which areas are
deemed critical.

>  F: default-configs/s390x-softmmu.mak
>  F: gdb-xml/s390*.xml
>  F: hw/char/sclp*.[hc]