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Things like "panics on certain content" like [1] or [2] are "security bugs" now. By that standard anything that fixes a potential panic is a "security bug". I've probably fixed hundreds if not thousands of "security bugs" in my career by that standard.

Barely qualifies as a "security bug" yet it's rated as "6.2 Moderate" and "7.5 HIGH". To say nothing of gazillion "high severity" "regular expression DoS" nonsense and whatnot.

And the worst part is all of this makes it so much harder to find actual high-severity issues. It's not harmless spam.

[1]: https://github.com/gomarkdown/markdown/security/advisories/G...

[2]: https://rustsec.org/advisories/RUSTSEC-2024-0373.html

Disastrous, apocalyptic consequences is the only way to get the attention of the real decision makers. If libxml2 just vanishes and someone explains to John Chrome or whoever that $150k a year will make the problem go away, it's a non-decision. $150k isn't even a rounding error on a rounding error for Google.

The only way to fight corporations just taking whatever they want is to absolutely wreck their shit when they misbehave.

Call it juvenile, sure, but corporations are not rational adults and usually behave like a child throwing a temper tantrum. There have to be real, painful and ongoing consequences in order to force a corporation to behave.

I suspect the maintainer would mind less if it was reported by actual users of the library who encountered a real world issue and even better if they offer a patch at the same time, but these bugs are likely the result of scanning tools or someone eyeballing the code for theoretical issues.

In light of the above, the proposed MAINTENANCE-TERMS.md makes a lot of sense, but I think it should also state that security researchers looking for CVEs or are concerned about responsible disclosure should contact the vendor of the software distributing the library.

This would put the onus on the large corporates leveraging the library (at no charge) to use their own resources to deal with addressing security researcher concerns appropriately and they can probably do most of the fix work themselves and the coordinate with the maintainer only to get a release out in a timely manner.

If maintainers find that people coming to them with security issues have done all work possible before hand, they’d probably be completely happy to help.

This is a garbage criticism. It’s perfectly adequate for that for almost everyone. If you are shipping it in a browser to billions of people, that’s a very unique situation, and any security issues are a you problem.

Not sure if this is intended to be a “show both sides” journalism thing but it’s a totally asshole throwaway comment.

“Three.”

“Like, the number 3? As in, 1, 2, …?”

“Yes. If you’re expecting me to pick, this will be CVE-3.”

> Even if it is a valid security flaw, it is clear why it might rankle a maintainer. The report is not coming from a user of the project, and it comes with no attempt at a patch to fix the vulnerability. It is another demand on an unpaid maintainer's time so that, apparently, a security research company can brag about the discovery to promote its services.

> If Wellnhofer follows the script expected of a maintainer, he will spend hours fixing the bugs, corresponding with the researcher, and releasing a new version of libxml2. Sveshnikov and Positive Technologies will put another notch in their CVE belts, but what does Wellnhofer get out of the arrangement? Extra work, an unwanted CVE, and negligible real-world benefit for users of libxml2.

> So, rather than honoring embargoes and dealing with deadlines for security fixes, Wellnhofer would rather treat security issues like any other bug; the issues would be made public as soon as they were reported and fixed whenever maintainers had time. Wellnhofer also announced that he was stepping down as the libxslt maintainer and said it was unlikely that it would ever be maintained again. It was even more unlikely, he said, with security researchers ""breathing down the necks of volunteers.""

> [...] He agreed that ""wealthy corporations"" with a stake in libxml2 security issues should help by becoming maintainers. If not, ""then the consequence is security issues will surely reach the disclosure deadline (whatever it is set to) and become public before they are fixed"".

You owe them nothing. That fact doesn’t mean maintainers or users should be a*holes to each other, it just means that as a user, you should be grateful and you get what you get, unless you want to contribute.

Or, to put it another way: you owe them exactly what they’ve paid for!

I think that's seriously over-estimating the quality of software in mainstream browsers and operating systems. Certainly some parts of mainstream OS's and browsers are very well written. Other parts, though...

I'm only half-joking when I say that one of the premier selling points of GPL over MIT in this day and age is that it explicitly deters these freeloading multibillion-dollar companies from depending on your software and making demands of your time.

    > ...there are currently four bugs marked with the security label in the libxml2 issue tracker. Three of those were opened on May 7 by Nikita Sveshnikov, a security researcher who works for a company called Positive Technologies.

FYI, Wiki tells me:

    > Positive Technologies is a Russian information security research company and a global leader in cybersecurity.

this is why i never report stuff to open source. if you wanna play bug bounty and cve hoarder its better to stick with bug bounty programs.

why? there the security researcher can be depressed about the process himself rather than some volunteer coder. gotta not make your issues other ppls issues.

Yes open source has changed, from when the early 90s. There are more users, companies use projects and make millions with other peoples work.

I feel with the maintainer, with how ungrateful people are. And demanding without giving.

Open Source licenses fall short.

Open Source projects should clearly state what they think about fixing security, taking on external contributions or if they consider the project feature complete. Just like standard licenses, we should have a standard, parseable maintenance "contract".

"I fix whatever you pay for, I fix nothing, I fix how I see fit. Including disclosure, etc."

So everyone is clear about what to expect.

Is the author being sarcastic? Or is that genuinely an immense sum relative to how little funding most FOSS gets?

a) nonsense in which case nobody should spend any time fixing this (I'm thinking things like the frontend DDOS CVEs that are common) b) an actual problem in which case a compliance person at one of these mega tech companies will tell the engineers it needs to be fixed. If the maintainer refuses to be the person fixing it (a reasonable choice), the mega tech company will eventually just do it.

I suppose the risk is the mega tech company only fixes it for their internal fork.

"All null-pointer-referencing issues should come with an accompanying fix pull request".

Also the not so relevant security bugs are not just costs to the developers but the library churn is also costing more and more users if the user is forced by policy to follow in a timely manner the latest versions in the name of "security".

Unhappy with a maintainer? Fork and maintain it yourself.

Some open source code creates issues in your project? Fix it and try to upstream. Upstream is not accepted? Fork and announce the fix.

Unpaid open source developers owe you nothing, you can't demand anything, their work is already a huge charitable contribution to humanity. If you can do better — fork button is universally available. Don't forget to say thank you to original authors while you stay on the shoulders of giants.

    The point is that libxml2 never had the quality to be used in mainstream browsers or operating systems to begin with. It all started when Apple made libxml2 a core component of all their OSes. Then Google followed suit and now even Microsoft is using libxml2 in their OS outside of Edge. This should have never happened. Originally it was kind of a growth hack, but now these companies make billions of profits and refuse to pay back their technical debt, either by switching to better solutions, developing their own or by trying to improve libxml2.
    The behavior of these companies is irresponsible. Even if they claim otherwise, they don't care about the security and privacy of their users. They only try to fix symptoms.

Of course that's exactly what traditional Linux distributions signed up to do.

Clearly many people have decided that they're better off without the distributions' packaging work. But maybe they should be thinking about how to get the "buffering" part back, and ideally make it work better than the distributions managed to.

That's reasonable, being a maintainer is a thankless job.

However i think there is a duty to step aside when that happens. If nobody can take the maintainer's place, then so be it, its still better than the alternative. Being burned out but continuing anyways just hurts everyone.

Its absolutely not the security researcher's fault for reporting real albeit low severity bugs (to be clear though, entirely reasonable for maintainers to treat low severity security bugs as public. The security policy is the maintainer's decision, its not right to blame researchers for following the policy maintainers set)

https://github.com/pizlonator/llvm-project-deluge

> The viewpoint expressed by Wellnhofer's is understandable, though one might argue about the assertion that libxml2 was not of sufficient quality for mainstream use. It was certainly promoted on the project web site as a capable and portable toolkit for the purpose of parsing XML. Open-source proponents spent much of the late 1990s and early 2000s trying to entice companies to trust the quality of projects like libxml2, so it is hard to blame those companies now for believing it was suitable for mainstream use at the time.

I think it's very obvious that the maintainer is sick of this project on every level, but the efforts to trash talk its quality and the contributions of all previous developers doesn't sit right with me.

This is yet another case where I fully endorse a maintainer's right to reject requests and even step away from their project, but in my opinion it would have been better to just make an announcement about stepping away than to go down the path of trash talking the project on the way out.