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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

VideoLAN doesn't come out of this looking particularly mature or professional. A lotta buck-passing...

Actually, Secunia comes out of this looking clueless. It has never been the responsibility of application developers to fix vulnerabilities in third-party libraries (like, ever). But they did anyway -- keep in mind that this is an open source initiative, not some large company with code monkeys ready to rumble.

Furthermore, Secunia doesn't seem to realize that VLC doesn't do static linking on all platforms (lol) -- I mean, why even go after VLC? This was clearly an ffmpeg problem. What a bunch of amateurs.

> It has never been the responsibility of application developers to fix vulnerabilities in third-party libraries (like, ever)

If your customer gets it from you, then it is your responsibility.

Actually, it's not, but you might have the responsibility to inform your customers. Consider closed-source libraries.

Like I said, the status quo has always been to delegate third-party vulnerabilities or bugs (especially if statically linked) to their respective vendors. The people from VLC were gentlemen for fixing the problem themselves and then upstreaming. I doubt many would disagree.

It depends. Vendors are obligated to handle upstream vulnerabilities once they become known, and commercial vendors are obligated to handle upstream vulnerabilities no matter what. The only situation in which a vendor can wash their hands of a vulnerability is the one in which they're informed of an upstream vulnerability and the upstream isn't, at which point that vendor is at least obligated to relay it to the upstream.

What customers though?

Edit: To clarify, from what I can tell no one has ever paid even a cent for VLC, though they may have donated to the VideoLAN project.

And regardless of whether you feel that they had any moral responsibility to fix the vulnerability anyway, it's hard to fault VideoLAN here since that is exactly what they did (unless you believe Secunia's side of the story, of course).

Dont be stupid. these get uplined like anythign else.

Secunia does seem selectively clueless (I think of it more as fear-mongering, what with the Twitter posturing and stealth edits of their reports), but AFAIK their vulnerability index exists to be linked from their "software inspector" products which scan binary Windows releases, which do tend to include bundled libraries.

However, their blog post makes no mention of that, and they don't seem to question the link between vulnerability PR and actual, verifiable vulnerabilities.

Of what to whom? VLC fixed the vulnerability themselves, and upstreamed the fix themselves.

They do complain that Secunia didn't inform or issue an advisory on upstream projects - if VLC had not taken the initiative themselves to upstream the fix then all other apps would still be vulnerable.

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