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Very interesting read, written with understandable fury. I find it concerning that software projects have to become CNAs to at least alleviate the harm of bogu

Very interesting read, written with understandable fury. I find it concerning that software projects have to become CNAs to at least alleviate the harm of bogus CVEs. There surely is some sort of CVE peer review? This should be possible for indefinitely long time after registering a CVE, because humans make mistakes. So it shouldn't be needed to shy away from marking CVEs as invalid / rejected retroactively if appropriate. It is understandable to err on the side of caution with vulnerability reports, but since reporting vulnerabilites has become an object of prestige, it seems needed to ramp up the scrutiny.

TomSwirly 3y ago
Agreed! Just one quibble: the reporter was anonymous, so they aren't doing it for prestige. Perhaps it's griefing?
- moritzwarhier 3y ago
  Good point. Reading the text, it also seems hard for MITRE to set general rules for when undefined memory access is a vulnerability. Here it is not exploitable because it is only in a debug build and because the accessed memory is out-of-bounds in the intended context, but provably always within the memory bounds that are readable by curl, if I understand correctly. For a case like this, it is easy to imagine this being one or two steps away from an actual vulnerability without having any actual security impact as-is. So, not a vulnerability. But requires explanation on why it isn't one.
  - garaetjjte 3y ago
    >but provably always within the memory bounds That doesn't tell the whole story in C code, though. Out-of-bounds access is UB, thus the whole branch could be assumed to be never taken and optimized out by an enterprising compiler. In this case it will only cause missing characters in console output, but "will at worst cause a crash" is not entirely true.
amluto 3y ago
I wonder if the curl people are giving this more attention than it deserves. I’ve reported (and fixed) a number of security issues over the years. Sometimes I get them CVE numbers. I’ve never believed that MITRE or NVD added the slightest bit of value in their analyses. The whole industry should recognize that CVEs are just a number. They are not, in and of themselves, worthy of entries on resumes, use in academic analyses, or much else. They simply identify an issue that may or may not be a security issue. There is an entire industry (of distros, etc) that triage issues and maybe deploy fixes, and for better or for worse that industry often requires a CVE number for its internal tracking. So assigning a CVE number in general seems about as meaningful as assigning any other string. If I say “FOOBAR-12345: I don’t like how ‘curl’ is spelled”, then that means about what it sounds like, that is, not much.
- bombcar 3y ago
  It can be an incredible hassle to have a bullshit CVE "high" assigned to a project when you're dealing with various requirements and reporting. Assuming the curl dude actually makes some money selling services to people who have to do that reporting, he now has to not only show that the "high" CVE is fixed in the latest release, but go and back port a fix to all the versions that are being "maintained" for these customers who have to fill out reports about CVEs. Even if all you have to do is respond to each with a "here's why this is bullshit", it still takes some time, time that could be better spent posting on HN.
  - tiltowait 3y ago
    > It can be an incredible hassle to have a bullshit CVE "high" assigned to a project when you're dealing with various requirements and reporting. Exactly. Last year, multiple CVEs were opened against node.js. They only impacted an experimental feature introduced in node 20, but NVD listed all versions of node as vulnerable (in contradiction with NVD's own summaries!). Many security tools treat NVD's word as gospel and refused to issue a correction in their findings, even though the erroneous reports were obvious and verifiable. It took multiple weeks for NVD to fix the entries despite receiving no doubt many emails about it. Flaws in the CVE process waste tons of time, especially (it seems) at large orgs.

TomSwirly 3y ago

Agreed! Just one quibble: the reporter was anonymous, so they aren't doing it for prestige. Perhaps it's griefing?

moritzwarhier 3y ago
Good point. Reading the text, it also seems hard for MITRE to set general rules for when undefined memory access is a vulnerability. Here it is not exploitable because it is only in a debug build and because the accessed memory is out-of-bounds in the intended context, but provably always within the memory bounds that are readable by curl, if I understand correctly. For a case like this, it is easy to imagine this being one or two steps away from an actual vulnerability without having any actual security impact as-is. So, not a vulnerability. But requires explanation on why it isn't one.
- garaetjjte 3y ago
  >but provably always within the memory bounds That doesn't tell the whole story in C code, though. Out-of-bounds access is UB, thus the whole branch could be assumed to be never taken and optimized out by an enterprising compiler. In this case it will only cause missing characters in console output, but "will at worst cause a crash" is not entirely true.

amluto 3y ago

I wonder if the curl people are giving this more attention than it deserves. I’ve reported (and fixed) a number of security issues over the years. Sometimes I get them CVE numbers. I’ve never believed that MITRE or NVD added the slightest bit of value in their analyses. The whole industry should recognize that CVEs are just a number. They are not, in and of themselves, worthy of entries on resumes, use in academic analyses, or much else. They simply identify an issue that may or may not be a security issue. There is an entire industry (of distros, etc) that triage issues and maybe deploy fixes, and for better or for worse that industry often requires a CVE number for its internal tracking. So assigning a CVE number in general seems about as meaningful as assigning any other string. If I say “FOOBAR-12345: I don’t like how ‘curl’ is spelled”, then that means about what it sounds like, that is, not much.

bombcar 3y ago
It can be an incredible hassle to have a bullshit CVE "high" assigned to a project when you're dealing with various requirements and reporting. Assuming the curl dude actually makes some money selling services to people who have to do that reporting, he now has to not only show that the "high" CVE is fixed in the latest release, but go and back port a fix to all the versions that are being "maintained" for these customers who have to fill out reports about CVEs. Even if all you have to do is respond to each with a "here's why this is bullshit", it still takes some time, time that could be better spent posting on HN.
- tiltowait 3y ago
  > It can be an incredible hassle to have a bullshit CVE "high" assigned to a project when you're dealing with various requirements and reporting. Exactly. Last year, multiple CVEs were opened against node.js. They only impacted an experimental feature introduced in node 20, but NVD listed all versions of node as vulnerable (in contradiction with NVD's own summaries!). Many security tools treat NVD's word as gospel and refused to issue a correction in their findings, even though the erroneous reports were obvious and verifiable. It took multiple weeks for NVD to fix the entries despite receiving no doubt many emails about it. Flaws in the CVE process waste tons of time, especially (it seems) at large orgs.