Re: [PATCH 2/2] Documentation: security-bugs.rst: clarify CVE handling

Greg Kroah-Hartman
2023-07-03T19:07:25Z

On Mon, Jul 03, 2023 at 11:35:37AM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 03, 2023 at 05:00:15PM +0200, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 03, 2023 at 06:08:00AM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> > > The security team does not assign CVEs, nor do we require them for
> > > reports or fixes, as this can needlessly complicate the process and may
> > > delay the bug handling. If a reporter wishes to have a CVE identifier
> > > assigned, they should find one by themselves, for example by contacting
> > > MITRE directly. However under no circumstances will a patch inclusion
> > > be delayed to wait for a CVE identifier to arrive.
> > >
> > > This puts the responsibility for finding one in time on the reporter
> > > depending on what they expect, and if they want it in the commit
> > > message, they'd rather have one before reporting the problem.
> >
> > Oh, nice wording, let me steal that! :)
>
> Yeah, this is good. The last sentence is a little hard to parse, so how
> about this, with a little more rationale expansion:
>
> However under no circumstances will patch publication be delayed for
> CVE identifier assignment. Getting fixes landed takes precedence; the
> CVE database entry will already reference the commit, so there is no loss
> of information if the CVE is assigned later.

"simple is better" should be the key here, reading a wall of text is
hard for people, so let me just keep the one new sentance that Willy
proposed and if people still struggle with the whole CVEs and
security@k.o mess in the future, we can revise it again.

Also, there is not really a "CVE database", I think that's what NVD from
NIST does and CNNVD from China does, and "Something to be named in the
future soon" will do for the EU. There is a "CVE List" at cve.org, but
that thing is always out of date, and for all of this I don't want to
have to try to explain it in our document as that's nothing we want to
mess with :)

thanks,

greg k-h