The Linux kernel project becomes a CVE numbering authority | Hacker News Reader

The Linux kernel project becomes a CVE numbering authority

lwn.net

77 pointscorbet24 comments

after the curl announcement i pretty much saw this one coming.

as i commented there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39054152

noone should ever be able to file a CVE without the product owner having a say in this.

filing a CVE should always include the party that is responsible for the vulnerability with proper checks and balances.

the current process allows accusing someone without the accused having any ability to defend themselves. it was created with the expectations that only security experts who know what they are doing will file CVEs. that expectation has not held.

this is pretty much why linus torvalds refused to announce when they fix security issues in the linux kernel.

> noone should ever be able to file a CVE without the product owner having a say in this.

That's a really stupid idea. CVEs track security vulnerabilities, not 'security vulnerabilities the product owner is prepared to admit to'.

Imagine if Cisco decided they were going to be the CNA for Cisco devices just weren't going to issue any CVEs for any vulnerabilities in any Cisco devices, regardless of whether they're exploited or not.

i am not saying that the product owner should be able to veto without being overridden, just that they should have a right to be heard, and that their response needs to be considered.

i do realize that many businesses would rather hide any security issues instead of acknowledging them. so a simple "no" or no response from them would not be enough.

but the current situation where we get a CVE for anything that is not proven to be safe (when giving that proof is very expensive to make) is also not helpful.

the linux kernel and curl becoming their own CVE authority is a hack to work around a broken process.

Who would be able to override the product owner? If it's the party that files, then what changed?

maybe a number of independent reviewers. kind of like we have reviewers for scientific papers,

except i would make the list of reviewers known and attached to the CVE like signoffs on patches, including reviewers that reject the claims. (actually, that should be done for papers as well, but that's a different discussion)

then you can evaluate the seriousness of any CVE not only by its assigned threat level but also by weighing who and how many people reviewed the claims.

further there could be review levels, also similar to how bug reports are handled: new/incoming, triage, verified/reproduced, closed/unreproducible, fixed.

that would allow further categorization and give people another way to evaluate if a CVE is serious.

Within the existing system, I think MITRE should be able to override a CNA, but I don’t know that they can, just that they don’t appear to do so.

There are "security researchers" who grep GitHub for the words 'password' or 'secret' and blindly file CVE's if they find any hits.

and those CVEs are rejected or revoked. There are bad actors everywhere; they're not a good excuse to stop trying.

There are -many- software vendors and developers that wont accept or even respond to security researchers. You are absolutely correct.

It's indeed stupid in general, but many big F/OSS projects suffer too much from this issue that they really want to do this.

A possible resolution would be to have two kinds of CVE numbers: researchers can request and get assigned provisional CVE numbers that don't look like the current CVE numbers (e.g. pCVE-2021-3PF5), and the current CVE number format would be used for verified CVE numbers where the vendor(s) have confirmed them (e.g. CVE-2021-22204). Note that my example assumes that they still share the same identifier space: a conversion from "3PF5" to "22204" should be mechanical [1]. So researchers can still use pCVE numbers as needed, but proper CVE numbers would require vendor's cooperation. That sounds a reasonable trade-off for the security purpose.

[1] I've specifically used bijective vigesimal numbers with digits from Open Location Code in this example. So 1..20 = 2..X, 21..420 = 22..XX, 421..8420 = 222..XXX and so on. I've specifically picked OLC because it avoids many profanity possibilities, but an ideal scheme would also avoid all-number identifiers to clearly distinguish it from normal CVE numbers.

I strongly disagree, whatever process we have should work also for 'hostile' vendors and allow for "the community" to verify and assert vulnerabilities even if the vendor denies them, attempts to take legal action, etc.

There are all kinds of options, perhaps national CERTs could override vendor decisions, perhaps something else, but we can't simply assume good-faith behavior from every vendor.

The whole reason why we have various community resources for tracking vulnerabilities was that relying on vendor behavior didn't (and doesn't) work, and it's up to the general public to figure out how force appropriate behavior with e.g. responsible disclosure deadlines, public shaming, etc; and CVEs are part of that mechanism of the community pushing reasonable standards on vendors whether they want it or not - since many vendors often have a clear financial motivation to act against user's interests, downplay and ignore vulnerabilities, and CVEs are for the benefit of system users, not vendors, they are how security researchers can communicate risks to the system users, with or without cooperation from the vendor.

CVE numbers are nothing more than identifiers for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures of all sorts and all severities, so they theoretically do not require any kind of vendor confirmations. However in the reality CVE numbers are seen as some sort of absolute indication of unsafety---which is hardly true---to both security researchers and vendors. So we have two opposite problems now:

1. Security researchers are gaming the CVE system to get more CVE numbers in their portfolio, resulting in frustrated vendors. This is why curl and Linux Kernel went for being CVE numbering authority (CNA) but...

2. Vendors are also trying to reduce the number of CVE numbers assigned for their products, and while not every vendor CNA is that hostile, some do become CNA solely for this purpose.

I believe we should deemphasize the impact of CVE numbers to solve both problems. They should be just identifiers for researchers and users and should not necessarily convey any sort of insecurity---otherwise you will end up with hostile vendors. We can't change the reputation of current CVE numbers however, so I proposed a "provisional" CVE number that hopefully do not convey the same reputation. Hostile vendors can prevent any new (confirmed) CVE number to be assigned, but that's not very much different from today. But we can forbid them from preventing new provisional CVE number to be assigned, assuming an appropriate process update. So we still retain a reliable identifier for CVEs; they can possibly be provisional however.

We tried that already, there used to be candidate CAN-* identifiers. Review to promote them to CVE-* identifiers was always a bottleneck.

That's a fair argument. But candidate numbers were abandandoned long before the current problem, back when there were only ~5000 CVE numbers assigned per year (vs. 52000+ for 2023). And more crucially, this review was done by the CVE Editorial Board, which is a small group of people who could vote for/against making it the "entry" status. That is clearly not scalable and I'm not proposing that. In fact, I believe there doesn't even need an actual vendor intervention to be "confirmed" in my scheme---the researcher should be able to attach a vendor response as an evidence in principle. (Of course such response can be forged, so there would have to be a proper process to counteract that.)

"No CVEs will be assigned for unfixed security issues in the Linux kernel, assignment will only happen after a fix is available as it can be properly tracked that way by the git commit id of the original fix."

Linus Torvalds: "A bug is a bug."

As a kernel developer of ATM driver, I couldn't careless if there is a bug, much less some public authority (t)outing my driver as buggy. They'll get fixed, unit-tested, and real-world live-tested for the next release.

Every bugfix in the kernel is now a CVE. That's awful.

Every unfixed security issue is now no longer assigned a CVE until it's fixed. That's even worse.

time for security researchers to drop CVEs and a start new scheme?

how about: CVF

http://notcve.org/about.html

Cv6 - 128 bits and never adopted.

Never is a bit harsh. Just a few decades...and a few more.

This will be interesting, if another linux vendor assigns a CVE and upstream duplicates the older CVE usually takes presedence, and they need to mark it as a duplicate, more houskeeping than just assigning it when they know about it.

I'm glad the LK finally has come to this conclusion, I dont care if it ends up exploding and using a lot of CVE's..

Good Work.

Just in case anybody is wondering if this is significant...think about the implications of tens of thousands of CVE numbers being assigned for every stable kernel patch. There will have to be changes in the ways people are dealing with these.

The linux CNA will just mean 'bug' and it will be impossible to know how severe any of them are.

So because the cve system has a few problems that annoy the kernel developers they decided an appropriate response is to completely sabotage it?

Mature, you guys.

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