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> This idea I had months ago will surely fix all the problems I just started thinking about today. I very rarely find myself agreeing with some take the author
by grayhatter 1y ago
> This idea I had months ago will surely fix all the problems I just started thinking about today.
I very rarely find myself agreeing with some take the author has made. To the point where I almost said never agree. But I always read though, because even though the suggestion is always surface level, it's also always well written and well expressed. I like the help in reasoning through my own thoughts, and his musings always give a good place to start explaining and correcting from.
I hate, with a passion, CVE farmers. Because sa much of it is noise these days. But everyone complaining^1 so far have all completly missed the forest for the trees. The reason everyone uses CVEs still is because the value from having a CVE was never to know the severity. (The difference between unauthenticated remote arbitrary code execution, and might create a partial denial of service in some rare and crafted cases, is 9.9 and 9.3) The value has always been the complete lack of ambiguity when discussing some defect with a security implication. You don't really understand something if you can't explain it, you can explain it if you don't have the words or names for it. CVE farming is a problem, but everyone uses CVEs because it makes defects easier to understand and talk about without misunderstandings or miscommunication.
I'd love to see whatever replaces CVEs included a super set, where CVEs, also have CRE, where Vulnerability is replaced by Risk and only when [handwavey answer about project owner agreement], which would ideally preserve the value we get from the current system. But would allow the incremental improvement suggested by the original comment this essay is responding to. I would like my CVEs to be exclusively vulns that are significant. But even more than I want that, I don't want to have to argue about where the bar for significant belongs!
No company wants to manage CVEs, there's nothing that's going to meaningfully change that in the short term. Which means no one is looking for a better CVE system. Everybody wants the devil they know, I have complaints about the CVE system. But don't want to try to replace it without accounting for how it's used, in addition to how it works (and breaks).
1^: it's still early, and the people rushing to post are often only looking at the surface level. I'm excited to hear deeper more reasoned thoughts, but that's likely to take more than just 24h