Is this what the security disagreements is about https://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx-announce/2024/NW6M...?
Yeah, very, very likely one and the same. Since 1989.
Can you say more about the CVE thing? That seems like the opposite of what Maxim Dounin was saying.
I don't know what else there is to say really. The QUIC/HTTP/3 vuln was found in NGINX OSS, which is also the basis for the commercial NGINX+ product. We looked at the issue and decided that, by our disclosure policies, we needed to assign a CVE and make a disclosure. And I was firmly in that camp - my personal motto is "Our customers cannot make informed decisions about their networks if we do not inform them." I fight for the users.
Anyway, Maxim did not seem to agree with that position. There wasn't much debate about it - the policy was pretty clear and we said we're issuing a CVE. And this is the result as near I can tell.
Honestly, anyone could have gone to a CNA and demanded a CVE and he would not have been able to stop it. That's how it works.
Even if third parties can file CVEs, do you think it hits different when the parent organization decides to do so against the developer's wishes? Why do he and F5 view the bugs differently? It sounds like the fork decision was motivated less by the actual CVEs and more about how the decision was negotiated (or not at all).
(PS. Thanks for participating in the discussion.)
Based on my observation of various NGINX forums and mailing lists, the HTTP/3 feature, while experimental, is seeing adoption by the leading edge of web applications, so I don't think it could be argued that its not being slowly rolled into production in places.
And appreciate the clarification about the CVE disagreement.
And the customers were, by and large, great.
I get that CVEs have been politicized and weaponized by a bunch of people, but it seems weird to object that strenuously to something like this.
> Honestly, anyone could have gone to a CNA and demanded a CVE and he would not have been able to stop it. That's how it works.
I recently did exactly that when a vendor refused to obtain a CVE themselves. In my case, I was doing it as part of an effort to educate the vendor on how CVEs worked.
I know there are other mentions - it's been in the commercial product since R30, hence the CVE.
>And, while the particular action isn't exactly very bad, the approach in general is quite problematic.
- CVEs are gold to researchers and organizations like citations are to academics. In this case, the CVEs were filed based on "policy" but it's unclear if they are just adding noise to the DB.
- The severity of the bug is not as severe as greater powers-that-be would like to think (again, they see it as doing due diligence; developers who know the ins and outs might see it as an overreaction).
- Bug is in an experimental feature.
I'm not saying one way is right or not in this case, just pointing out my experience has generally been that CVEs are kind of broken in general...
If you run a web app of any sort, and you don't have "X-Frame-Options: Deny" in your headers, you'll get lots of "researchers" (that are probably bots) e-mailing you that you have a CRITICAL security issue.
"Beg bounties", we call them.
But I agree DoS is kind of a strawman since everything connected to a network is vulnerable to some form of DoS without extensive mitigation.
That very much depends on what service is being denied. Nginx is _everywhere_. While not a direct security concern for nginx (instead an availablity issue) it could have security or safety implications for wider systems. What if knocking out nginx breaks a service for logging & monitoring security information? Or an ambulance call out management system? Or a payment progressing system for your business at the busiest time if your trading year? There are many other such examples. This sort of thing is why availablity can be considered a security matter and therefore why DoS vulnerabilities, particularly those affecting common software, are handled as security issues of significant severity.
With fairly cheap ddos services you can "just" order you can knock most servers offline anyway. Internet reachability is rarely safety-critical, and if it is, that's probably a huge design flaw somewhere because there's tons of reasons outside of your control that can make the internet not work for either the server or clients.
Is all of this inconvenient and (potentially) a serious problem? Sure. But not "zomg criminals have credit card records / can spoof random domains / read private data / etc. etc." type serious.
A DoS bug and an DDoS attack are very different things. One is a flaw that can bring a service down, the other is a brute force technique for making a service unusable. You can DDoS services without exploiting bugs.
What about serving certificate revocation list, with another system relying on say one day old cache? (Sure, that's "fail open" - but still...).
Or proxying LDAP for sync to a central auth/authz system?
Ed: proxy giving access to logging system goes down - alert on failed logins silenced, disabling rate limits for brute force attacks?
Viewed in this light a bug that enables a successful Denial of Service (DoS) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a security bug. A bug that causes a DoS or DDoS, but is not exploitable, would not be a security bug (e.g., some idiot added an infinite loop to the startup code). That's where issue triage comes in, a bug should never be assigned before its triaged. Sometimes triage results in 'we don't know enough' and someone gets assigned to evaluate the bug to answer specific questions before triage can finished. After triage is get assigned - or even better, a developer with a matching skill set chooses it to work on for the next release/sprint/etc.
... to this specific bug in an experimental feature.
Originally I read your comment as Maxim doesn't want to use CVEs at all.
Where was the disagreement hashed out, so I can read more?