On 8/17/20 1:08 PM, Joe Orton wrote:
> At the moment we follow the standard ASF process for handling security
> vulnerabilities, https://www.apache.org/security/committers.html
>
> This includes the following step where fixes are committed with
> "obscured" commit messages prior to release:
>
> "12. The project team commits the fix. No reference should be made to the
> commit being related to a security vulnerability."
>
> I find this deeply distateful, and poor practice, for three reasons:
>
> a) it requires committers to lie (either by omission, or explicitly)
> when describing changes in the source code history. If there were an
> extremely good justification for lying, say, fixing an embargoed
> Critical vulnerability which affects millions of servers, I could live
> with it. But we apply this for everything, even trivial Low-severity
> vulnerabilities.
>
> b) it creates a nasty conflict for mod_h2, where Stefan is cutting
> mod_h2 releases at github which he knows address vulnerabilities, but is
> unable to disclose that until the time of an httpd release. So mod_h2
> users have access to releases which fix undisclosed vulnerabilities for
> sometimes months prior to an httpd release, but aren't given the true
> information on why/whether they need to upgrade.
>
> c) because our mirrored git history is immutable, svn revision log
> message changes - which retroactively add CVE names and make the svn log
> a "true" record of history, rather than one containing deliberate lies,
> never make it to the git log.
>
> My preference is that we follow the ASF process for Critical
> vulnerabilities, and for anything less than Critical we use a modified
It might be debatable if the ASF process should already apply for Important
vulnerabilities, but otherwise I agree.
I don't think that low or moderate security issues always require an immediate
release to be done. Hence I think it would be fine
to just have the patches available. OTOH some of these patches might need
tweaks before they could be backported e.g. due to merge
conflicts and hence it wouldn't be that easy for some users to apply them.
Maybe the workaround here is to work on these patches in /pmc/httpd/SECURITY/
first and keep stuff there until
a backport proposal has been voted on there such that we can commit to trunk
and 2.4.x nearly at the same time with the "true"
commit message and people who don't want to wait for the release can pick up
the patch from the 2.4.x branch and merge it
into their build.
> version of the ASF policy, which has instead:
>
> 12. The project team commits the fix, referencing the assigned CVE, and
> then:
>
> a. Notifies the reporter that the fix is public, and will be included
> in a future release.
>
> b. Notifies MITRE, etc etc as per 15. (e) in the ASF policy
>
> 13, 14, 15 as per ASF policy except for MITRE disclose being done earlier.
>
> 16 is now unnecessary.
>
> This roughly reverts the httpd process to what we used prior to adopting
> the Tomcat-esque policy for the whole ASF. We would have to document
> this and possibly need it approved by the ASF security team.
Not sure if we need to have it approved, but at least we should discuss with
the ASF security team.
Regards
Rüdiger
