Re: Question about dual source vendors

[Kurt Seifried <kseifried@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 6:25 PM, Adinolfi, Daniel R <dadinolfi@mitre.org> wrote:

Thinking through the issue:

Ideally, the vendor would themselves be a CNA, covering their products regardless of the type of licensing model.

That is my long term goal for anyone and everyone basically, but I think a graduated CVE response will help ease people in, as I see it for DWF:

1) You ask the DWF for CVEs and use them internally/with partners/etc, and put them in your commits/changelogs/advisories at a minimum (at least one public artifact), and ideally into security advisories (with details like CWE/etc.), and ideally you report them back to the DWF. Basically what secalert@redhat.com does (we don't chase people down at all, just assign and mark as used in our pool with some basic info). 

 

2) You start asking the DWF for CVEs in a structured manner that encourages and shows you've gotten the hang of "what is a security vuln" and "SPLIT/MERGE", at this point you are definitely using the CVEs publicly, and informing the DWF as they go public.

3) You graduate to CNA status and get a block and commit to the DWF in an automated fashion (in other words no more human resources from the DWF side are needed unless there is a problem). 

Some people/projects may never "Graduate" past step one and that's fine (it's better than no CVEs!). 

Not every company can be or wants to be a CNA, of course, so how do we handle those?

See above.

 

If there is another sector-based CNA (e.g., Healthcare systems) or a regional CNA (e.g., JPCERT), the company could work directly with those CNAs, who will facilitate the CVE assignment and disclosure regardless.

If another federated CNA hierarchy wants to take the vendor (or the vendor is more suited to them) and train them and make sure they do CVE properly I'm all for that (less work for me, and the community gets their CVEs!). 

 

If neither of these situations fit, it will depend on how DWF manages their assignees. MITRE as a CNA has the advantage of being a trusted third party for vulnerability disclosure. When closed-source software is involved, that trust can be important. If DWF creates that same level of trust with closed-source vendors, they could also fulfill that role. But this leads to some tricky scoping issues, and it could create situations similar to "CNA shopping" or introduce other coordination issues.

One thing I do sometimes ask is "have you already asked for a cve from MITRE/anyone else?" depending on the request (some you can tell probably have because they say "we've had trouble getting a CVE, can you give us one?"

 

How do other folks feel about these scoping issues?

Ideally the vendor is responsive enough that reporters don't go CVE shopping, and if they do they tell the vendor (who tells me) so we don't end up with dupes. I suspect cutting down the assignment time will largely solve this.

 

Thanks.

-Dan

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From: owner-cve-editorial-board-list@lists.mitre.org <owner-cve-editorial-board-list@lists.mitre.org> on behalf of Kurt Seifried <kseifried@redhat.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2016 7:13:58 PM
To: cve-editorial-board-list
Subject: Question about dual source vendors

 

So increasingly we have "dual source" vendors, that is vendors with everything from fully OSI Open Source to completely closed source. Basically any large commercial vendor already (Microsoft, Oracle, etc.) and a growing number of others (witness the proliferation of GitHub projects). 

I am talking to one that is not a CNA, and they want to do CVEs for both their Open Source, and their closed source. But there is no easy way to do this currently other than ask cve-assign@mitre.org directly (and it seems after they read the https://cve.mitre.org/cve/data_sources_product_coverage.html document they were under the impression cve-assign@mitre.org could NOT do it). 

I would like to propose that for vendors where Open Source is a major part of what they ship, or the core of their commercial; product that the DWF be able to take them under it's wing as it were.

One hypothetical example that fits into this model would be a company like Ansible (let's ignore the fact that Red Hat acquired it and as such Ansible falls under the Red Hat CNA), Ansible currently has "ansible" which is the Open Source core, and Ansible tower which is a currently closed source management/dashboard. I think in a case like this it makes sense to have a company like Ansible be a CNA under the DWF for both the Open Source parts and the closed source parts. 

Thought/comments?

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Kurt Seifried -- Red Hat -- Product Security -- Cloud
PGP A90B F995 7350 148F 66BF 7554 160D 4553 5E26 7993
Red Hat Product Security contact: secalert@redhat.com

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--
Kurt Seifried -- Red Hat -- Product Security -- Cloud
PGP A90B F995 7350 148F 66BF 7554 160D 4553 5E26 7993
Red Hat Product Security contact: secalert@redhat.com