The minutes item about the UI/UX aspect of dealing with security
vulnerabilities is something that, in the last design meeting, John and
myself specifically asked to be brought up at the ESC - assuming it
would be part of a larger discussion of this matter. I want to thank
Heiko for bringing the subject up and I'm glad this was discussed, but
Miklos' response suggests that the ESC is considering this as
weakly-related future enhancement rather than part of the response to
the (past and) current vulnerability.
About what we are currently doing:
1. I have not been prompted to upgrade to 7.6.2. Granted, I'm on Linux,
but that's still a significant percentage of our users; have Windows
users been prompted to upgrade? Even if they otherwise don't care about
upgrades?
2. When looking at "Check for updates..." I am told: "LibreOffice 7.6.2
is available" - not even a mention of the security issue, let alone a
warning that an update is highly advisable because of it, a link to
guidance about the vulnerability etc. Most users will probably not
bother: "Why should I switch from 7.6.0.3 to 7.6.2? It's not even a
second-level version number change. My LibreOffice works fine, let's not
waste time on this."
3. So, LibreOffice 7.4 is out of official support. Have old-LO-version
users been warned by the app about the security vulnerability? If not
specifically, have they been actively and intrusively warned on June
12th that they should upgrade LO, to avoid potential security
vulnerabilities? IIANM, the answer is negative.
Note that I am not suggesting we auto-update without user consent. That
is for others to decide (never auto-update, opt-in to auto-update,
auto-update by default with opt-out). But security warnings, while
auto-update is not in effect, are important. Of course some people might
want to opt out of any call-home behavior, even for security warnings,
and that should be respected as well.
Eyal
On 29/09/2023 10:52, Xisco Fauli wrote:
Hello,
This particular issue only affects users using LibreOffice 7.4,
LibreOffice 7.5 and LibreOffice 7.6 since the Webp support was added in
LibreOffice 7.4. See https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.4
For those users still using LibreOffice 7.4, the official support of
this branch ended in June 12, 2023 ( See
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan/7.4 ) so if they are
still using it, we can't force them to upgrade their version to a newer
one. They have been suggested to upgrade it for a while now, even before
this vulnerability was known.
For 7.5 and 7.6 users, the autoupdater has been already bumped to 7.5.7
and 7.6.2 respectively so users will be suggested to upgrade the next
time they launch LibreOffice. It's also up to them to upgrade it or not.
Marketing is also spreading the word in different channels about the
importance of this release ( see
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2023/09/26/lo-762-and-lo-757/ )
For the future, it's possible there will be an automatic updater
mechanism in place, see the ESC minutes from yesterday (
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2023-September/091022.html "The
UI/UX aspect of how to deal with security vulnerabilities" topic)
Regards
On 28/9/23 23:26, Eyal Rozenberg wrote:
But Sophie, from the dev point of view, the problem is actually not
solved - until LO has a mechanism for pushing intrusive notifications of
required critical updates (with an opt-out for people who don't want
that). Some might disagree with this position, but it is certainly a
matter for discussion in the ESC.
Also, the ESC has not mapped out for us the potential for exploiting the
vulnerability with LO (with and without "social engineering" of user
behavior). While that is not critical, it would be useful both for
identifying, retroactively, LO exploitation as the culprit in case of
actual malicious intrusions; and for those rare cases where an upgrade
is impossible for some reason.
Eyal
On 28/09/2023 23:23, sophi wrote:
Hi Eyal, John,
Just to give some information on this peculiar episode. The CVE happened
just before the conference where most of the team was traveling, not
easy to do a respin in those conditions.
What Miklos meant is that in the *dev* point of view it was solved, a
fix has been provided thanks to Caolan, that's all developers can do
"they move on to the next issue". So nothing more on their side to talk
about. It doesn't mean they don't care about users, they have done their
job in fixing the issue, the rest is not in their power. It's up to us,
you, me.
Then it's up to release engineering, UX and marketing to act. What RE
did from Monday to today because there was some problem with a Mac
version.
We have discussed today inside the team how we could better served our
users when this type of issue emerged. Security is a difficult topic to
talk about, there is not only the fix, but how it's embargoed for other
products, etc.
I think the best way now to go on positively on this is to have a
discussion between marketing, UX and RE: should we have a pop-up in the
product advertising about security fix, should we have a special
communication campaign. Most of the time, there is an embargo and we
release security fixes without communication because of that, what
should we do?
Please, open the discussion on the marketing list, all points of view
and ideas are valuable, but don't shout to our developers, they provided
a fix very quickly, up to us to know how to communicate it now. This was
a new situation that needs to be addressed, your opinion about users is
very much valid, how should we go from there now?
Cheers
Sophi
Le 28/09/2023 à 21:36, Eyal Rozenberg a écrit :
I second John's sentiment.
For the vast majority of LibreOffice users, this security problem is
_not_ fixed. And that is because they run versions of LibreOffice with
the vulnerability but without the fix; and have not been made aware of
the vulnerability and the release-with-a-fix.
I would claim that we are responsible to make our users thus aware.
Now,
it's true that a user is not likely to allow this particular exploit to
be taken advantage of, since that would mean directing LO at a
malicious
.webp somewhere. But - we have over 200 million users IIANM. If
malicious .webp's turn up on the web, it's quite likely some of our
users may do this by mistake; and we would bear some of the
responsibility for the consequences of such an outcome - after we've
told our users that they are in the capable hands of "security experts"
(to quote our website).
Also, what if, next time, the vulnerability is easier to exploit? Do we
even have the mechanism to push at least a warning about the need to
update LO?
Eyal
PS 1: I have widened the CC of this exchange, as this question relates
to how we present LibreOffice to users; our claims regarding the
quality
of this product; and the implicit and explicit guarantees we make to
users.
PS 2: Many of us are not able to attend ESC sessions - in general, and
especially in the middle of a work day. And when this is the case we
send an email asking for relevant issues to be considered.
Personally, I
struggle to attend even the design meetings (where I believe I can
be of
more use).
On 28/09/2023 11:44, John Mills wrote:
Hello Miklos,
Is it an acceptable statement just to say that "we" move on? Yes, the
issue is now resolved for those people that download the newest
version
of LibreOffice. However what about the many millions of users that
will
not update or have no idea that they are now susceptible to this high
rated CVE?
This is not a compelling strategy and does not serve the best
interests
of these users. I think it is poor for the reputation of
LibreOffice and
the Document Foundation that there are many millions of unpatched
instances being used that could negatively impact people like this.
Perhaps this particular CVE is on the scale of things considered not
that critical, however what is the strategy if there was ever an
exploit
that significantly impacted LibreOffice? How would this be made
known to
our user and corrected?
With best regards,
John
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On Thu, 28 Sept 2023 at 8:13 am, Miklos Vajna
<vmik...@collabora.com> wrote:
Hi Eyal,
On Wed, Sep 27, 2023 at 08:31:04PM +0300, Eyal Rozenberg
<eyalr...@gmx.com <mailto:eyalr...@gmx.com>> wrote:
> I would like to ask you to discuss the situation with the
recent CVE:
> https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157231
<https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157231>
It was already discussed 2 weeks ago. If you have specific
questions,
please ask on the developer list or take part in the ESC call
yourself.
In short: the problem is fixed, it's released, we move on.
Regards,
Miklos
