oss-security - Re: Buffer Overflow in raptor widely unfixed in Linux distros

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Message-Id: <379461F4-66C3-4EAF-A762-BB3C14B9152F@gentoo.org>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2020 19:49:01 +0000
From: Sam James <sam@...too.org>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Buffer Overflow in raptor widely unfixed in Linux
 distros



> On 16 Nov 2020, at 19:06, Marius Bakke <marius@....org> wrote:
> 
> "David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@...eeler.com> writes:
> 
>> If you think that CVE assignment is still of “fluctuating reliability” I’d like to hear that argument
>> and get it fixed. It’s normally better to fix the standard process for doing something than
>> to create yet another process that runs in parallel. I’ve seen no recent evidence of this reliability issue.
> 
> Speaking as a co-maintainer of an understaffed GNU/Linux distribution
> who fixed this back in 2017[0], I preferred the "old days" when free
> software security problems were almost always discussed on this list.
> 
> While there's no questioning the utility of CVEs in general (Guix can
> check the CVE list for any given package with 'guix lint -c cve PKG'),
> there are still unresolved CPE mappings, and I don't know how to get
> informed of new problems without checking specific (or all) packages.
> 
> I tried following the CVE assignment RSS feed initially, but it was not
> suitable for human consumption.
> 

I share the same problems.

We’ve taken to a mix in Gentoo:

1) Automated import of RSS feeds (but this isn’t that fit for human consumption, especially with the large dumps of various corporate appliance CVEs every so often);

2) I maintain a list of announcement mailing lists to read: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Sam/Security/Release_announcements. I skim announcements for security-related notes. But this doesn’t help if upstream is inactive;

3) I subscribe to *other* distros’ security announcement mailing lists to help reduce the chance of missing anything;

4) I check the Twitter @CVENew feed ~regularly;

5) Repology (https://repology.org/) has the ability to say if it thinks a package is vulnerable. It’s not 100% accurate (it can’t be), but it helps;

6) Of course, subscribe to this list (and linux-distros);

7) Subscribe to other security-related mailing lists like fulldisclosure.

There’s probably some other ways that I’m not thinking of right now. I’m still relatively new to the game so any tips are really welcome too.

> How do other distros keep up with new CVE assignments?
> 
> [0] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=099c9fdae623e06e4fded8b0d4e55d9d5b56715b

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