Why is it insane? The CVE goal was to track vulnerabilities that customers could be exposed to. It is used…in public, released versions. Why wouldn’t it be tracked?
It's in the published source code, as a usable feature, just flagged as experimental and not compiled by default. It's not like this is some random development branch. It's there, to be used en route to being stable. People will have downloaded a release tagged version of the source code, compiled that feature in and used it.
By what definition is that not shipped?
> I am actually completely shocked this needs to be explained. Legitimate insanity.
I've had an optional experimental feature marked with a CVE. It's not a big deal as it just lets folks know that they should upgrade if they are using that experimental feature in the affected versions.
Where did you get this info? It might be the feature is actively being worked on and the DoS is a known issue which would be fixed before merge. Lot of projects have contrib folder for random scripts and other things which wouldn't get merged before some review but users are free to run the script if they want to. Experimental compile time build flags are experimental by definition.
You're all also missing the fact that the vuln is also in the NGINX+ commercial product, not just OSS. Which has a different release model.
Being the same code it'd be darn strange to have the CVE for one and not the other. We did ask ourselves that question and quickly concluded it made no sense.
"made no sense" from a narrow, CVE announcement perspective, but Maxim disagrees from another perspective:
> [F5] decided to interfere with security policy nginx
> uses for years, ignoring both the policy and developers’ position.
>
> That’s quite understandable: they own the project, and can do
> anything with it, including doing marketing-motivated actions,
> ignoring developers position and community. Still, this
> contradicts our agreement. And, more importantly, I no longer able
> to control which changes are made in nginx within F5, and no longer
> see nginx as a free and open source project developed and
> maintained for the public good.
I'm not sure what "contradicts our agreement" means but the simple interpretation is that he feels that F5 have become too dictatorial to the open source project.
The whole drama seems very short-sighted from F5's perspective. Maxim was working for you for free for years and you couldn't find some middle ground? I imagine there could have been some page on the free nginx project that listed CVEs that are in the enterprise product but that are not considered CVEs for the open source project given its stated policy of not creating CVEs for experimental features, or something like that.
To nuke the main developer, cause this rift in the community, and create a fork seems like a great microcosm of the general tendency of security leads to wield uncompromising power. I get it. Security is important. But security isn't everything and these little fiefdoms that security leads build up are bureaucratic and annoying.
I hope you understand that these uncompromising policies actually reduce security in the end because 10X developers like Maxim will start to tend to avoid the security team and, in the worst case, hide stuff from their security team. I've seen this play out over and over in large corporations. In that sense, the F5 security team is no different.
But there should be a collaborative, two-way process between security and development. I'm sure security leads will say that they have that, but that's not what I find. Ultimately, if there's an escalation, executives will side with the security lead, so it is a de facto dictatorship even if security leads will tend to avoid the nuclear option. But when you take the nuclear option, as you did in this case, don't be surprised by the consequences.
OK - I need to make very clear that I'm speaking for myself and NOT F5, OK? OK.
Ask yourself why this matters? What is the big deal about having a CVE assigned? A CVE is just a unique identifier for a vulnerability so that everyone can refer to the same thing. It helps get word out to users who might be impacted, and we know there are sites using this feature in production - experimental or not. This wasn't dictating what could or could not go into the code - my understanding was the vuln wasn't even in his code, but from another contributor. So, honestly, how does issuing the CVEs impact his work, at all?
That's what I, personally, don't understand. At a functional level, this really has no impact on his work or him personally. This is just documentation of an existing issue and a fix which had to be made, and was being made, CVE or no CVE. And this is worth a fork?
What you're suggesting is the best thing to do is to allow one developer to dictate what should or should not be disclosed to the user base, based on their personal feelings and not an analysis of the impact of that vulnerability on said user base? And if they're inflexible in their view and no compromise can be reached then that's OK?
Sometimes there's just no good compromise to be reached and you end up with one person on one side, and a lot of other people on the other, and if that one person just refuses to budge then it is what it is. Rational people can agree to disagree. In my career there have been many times when I have disagreed with a decision, and I could either make peace with it or I could polish my resume. To me it seems a drastic step to take over something as frankly innocuous as assigning a CVE to an acknowledged vulnerability. Clearly he felt differently, and strongly, on the matter. Maybe he is just very strongly anti-CVE in general, or maybe he'd been feeling the itch to control his own destiny and this was just the spur it took to make the move.
His reasons are his own, and maybe he'll share more in time. I'm comfortable with my personal stance in the matter and the recommendations I made; they conform with my personal and professional morals and ethics. I'm sorry it came to this, but I would not change my recommendation in hindsight as I still feel we did the right thing.
Only time will tell what the results of that are. I think the world is big enough that it doesn't have to be a zero sum game.
I guess a vulnerability doesn’t count unless it’s default lol. Just don’t make it default and you never have any responsibility nor does those who use it or use a vendor version that has added it in their product.
>I guess a vulnerability doesn’t count unless it’s default lol.
It's still being tested. It's not complete. It's not released. It's not in the distribution. The amount of people that have this feature in the binary AND enabled is less than the amount of people that agree that this should be a CVE.
CVE's are not for tracking bugs in unfinished features.
It IS in the code that anyone can compile to use or integrate in projects as is the OSS way. Splitting hairs because it’s not in the default binary is absurd. Guess all the extra FFMPEG compilation flags and such shouldn’t count either.
