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Comment by danlitt | Hacker News Reader

> it seems obvious that disclosure policy for FOSS should be “when patch available” and not static X days

This is very far from obvious. If google doesn't feel like prioritising a critical issue, it remains irresponsible not to warn other users of the same library.

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If that’s the case why give the OSS project any time to fix at all before public disclosure? They should just publish immediately, no? Warn other users asap.

Why do you think it has to be all or nothing? They are both reasonable concerns. That's why reasonable disclosure windows are usually short but not zero.

Because it gives maintainers a chance to fix the issue, which they’ll do if they feel it is a priority. Google does not decide your priorities for you, they just give you an option to make their report a priority if you so choose.

Timed disclosure is just a compromise between giving project time and public interests. People have been doing this for years now. Why are people acting like this is new just because ffmpeg is whining?

And occasionally you do see immediate disclosures (see below). This usually happens for vulnerabilities that are time-sensitive or actively being exploited where the user needs to know ASAP. It's very context dependent. In this case I don't think that's the case, so there's a standard delayed disclosure to give courtesy for the project to fix it first.

Note the word "courtesy". The public interest always overrides considerations for the project's fragile ego after some time.

(Some examples of shortened disclosures include Cloudbleed and the aCropalypse cropping bug, where in each case there were immediate reasons to notify the public / users)

Full (immediate) disclosure, where no time is given to anyone to do anything before the vulnerability is publicly disclosed, was historically the default, yes. Coordinated vulnerability disclosure (or "responsible disclosure" as many call it) only exists because the security researchers that practice it believe it is a more effective way of minimizing how much the vulnerability might be exploited before it is fixed.

Part of the problem is that many of the issues are not really critical, no?

Unless the maintainers are incompetent or uncooperative this does not feel like a good strategy. It is a good strategy on Google's side because it is easier for them to manage

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