Copyright 2017, OpenStack Vulnerability Management Team Copyright 2023, Haskell Security Response Team This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode Original version: https://opendev.org/openstack/ossa/src/branch/master/doc/source/vmt-process.rst
The HSRT coordinates responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities in the Haskell ecosystem and help Haskell users have an accurate and timely assessment of risks.
Members of the team are independent and security-minded folks who ensure that vulnerabilities are dealt with in a timely manner and that downstream stakeholders are notified in a coordinated and fair manner. Where a member of the team is employed by a downstream stakeholder, the member does not give their employer prior notice of any vulnerabilities. In order to reduce the disclosure of vulnerability in the early stages, membership of this team is intentionally limited to a small number of people.
Each security bug is assigned a HSRT coordinator (member from the haskell security response team) that will coordinate the disclosure process. Here are the steps we follow.
High-impact vulnerabilities can be reported privately to [email protected]. We do not use PGP. Alternatively, Haskell vulnerabilities can be reported via the CERT/CC VINCE system. Use "Haskell Programming Language" as the vendor name.
As a volunteer effort with limited resources, we coordinate security response for embargoed vulnerabilities for high impact issues only. Factors that influence whether we will deal with an issue under embargo or not include:
- How severe is the vulnerability?
- How widely used is the library or tool in which the issue occurs?
- Does the issue also affect other ecosystems, or is there already a security response underway? (We will not break someone else's embargo.)
Public reports can be submitted as a regular issue or PR on the security-advisories repo. In that case, please follow the process defined in the Reporting Vulnerabilities document.
The first steps performed by the HSRT are to:
- check that the report indicates the correct project and adjust as necessary.
- contact the project's maintainer for confirmation of impact and determination of affected version.
In the mean time, the HSRT coordinator works with the reporter to to refine their draft security advisory using the template defined in the Reporting Vulnerabilities document.
The advisory is validated by the reporter and the project's maintainer.
Once the patches are approved, a signed email with the vulnerability description is sent to the downstream stakeholders. The notice will state the planned disclosure date. No stakeholder is supposed to deploy public patches before disclosure date.
In preparation for this, make sure you have a maintainer available to help pushing the fix at disclosure time.
On the disclosure hour, open bug, push patches for review and fast-track approvals (referencing the bug).
If a CVE got assigned when the report is still private,
MITRE's CVE Request form should be used
again at this point, but instead select a request type of
Notify CVE about a publication and fill in the coordinator's e-mail
address, provide a link to the advisory, the CVE IDs covered, and
the date published. Once more, fill in the
security code at the bottom of the page and submit request.
Shortly after pushing the patches (potentially waiting for the first test runs to complete), publish the advisory to the repository.
Patches approved in code review do not necessarily merge immediately, but should be tracked closely until they do.
If a report is held in private for 90 days without a fix, or significant details of the report are disclosed in a public venue, the report is terminated by a HSRT coordinator at that time and subsequent process switches to the public report workflow instead.
The science of vulnerability management is somewhere around being able to assess impact and severity of a report, being able to design security patches, being an obsessive process-following perfectionist and respecting the rule of lesser disclosure.
Lesser disclosure is about disclosing the vulnerability details to an increasing number of people over time, but only to the people that are necessary to reach the next step.
Vulnerability reporters retain final control over the disclosure of their findings. If for some reason they are uncomfortable with our process, their choice of disclosure terms prevails.
Haskell packages are used in a number of distributions, products, private and public service offerings that are negatively affected by vulnerabilities. In the spirit of responsible disclosure, this ecosystem, collectively known as the downstream stakeholders, needs to be warned in advance to be able to prepare patches and roll them out in a coordinated fashion on disclosure day. The disclosure period is kept voluntarily small (3-5 business days), as a middle ground between keeping the vulnerability under cover for too long and not giving a chance to downstream stakeholders to react.
If you're currently not a referenced stakeholder and think you should definitely be included on that email distribution list, please submit an email with a rationale to member(s) of the HSRT.
Currently, we use the following private email lists for responsible disclosures:
We also have a few personal emails for interested parties which are not published in the repository, for privacy/anti-spam reasons. If you want your email to be included here, please send us a PR.
This issue is being treated as a potential security risk.
Please do not make any public mention of private
security vulnerabilities before their coordinated
publication by the Haskell Security Response Team in the
form of an official Haskell Security Advisory (HSEC). This includes
discussion of the bug or associated fixes in public forums such as
mailing lists, code review systems and bug trackers. Please also
avoid private disclosure to other individuals not already approved
for access to this information, and provide this same reminder to
those who are made aware of the issue prior to publication. All
discussion should remain confined to this private bug report, and
any proposed fixes should be added to the bug as attachments. This
status shall not extend past $NINETY_DAYS and will be made
public by or on that date even if no fix is identified.
The NINETY_DAYS value should be 90 days from the date the report is
accepted by the coordinator and project reviewers are subscribed. It can
be trivially calculated with the date -I -d90days shell command.
- To: TBD
- Subject: [pre-HSEC] Vulnerability in Haskell $PROJECT ($CVE)
The message body for both emails should be identical: :
This is an advance warning of a vulnerability discovered in
Haskell $PROJECT, to give you, as downstream stakeholders, a chance to
coordinate the release of fixes and reduce the vulnerability window.
Please treat the following information as confidential until the
proposed public disclosure date.
$ADVISORY
See attached patches. Unless a flaw is discovered in them, these
patches will be merged to their corresponding branches on the public
disclosure date.
Proposed public disclosure date/time:
$DISCLOSURE, 1500UTC
Please do not make the issue public (or release public patches)
before this coordinated disclosure date.
--
$HSRT_COORDINATOR_NAME
Haskell Security Response Team
Proposed patches are attached, email must be GPG-signed. Use something
unique and descriptive for the patch attachment file names, for example
cve-2013-4183-$project.patch or
cve-2013-4183-$project-stable-1.0.patch.
Refers to the ./EXAMPLE_ADVISORY.md.