Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- > A series of highly unlikely conditions that all need to be fulfilled for this to become a vulnerability.
Poor thinking. A vulnerability is a vulnerability regardless. The conditions apply to the exploit.
by chrisjj - Did you notice the part where Daniel said they had fixed it two months before the first report?by MBCook
- I had to tag bogus CVE's with invalid_cve, but I didn't care to complain to MITRE 3 times to get the CVE's rejected. That's not worth it. Eg people were filing CVE's against unreleased versions, and such.by rurban
- Quite interesting the response from MITRE: `It is not considered a security vulnerability because of how it requires a local attacker with privileges present to make it so`.
I didn't knew about that rationale. I thought Defense-in-Depth was all about that, preventing security incidents even when an attacker start to get some elevated privileges on the system?
If not, that's quite a practical reference for future CyberSec meetings.
by ygouzerh - I think all this goes to the joke/not-a-joke about "you aren't a real hacker until you have a CVE to your name". Its also a form of forced social proof.by nekusar
- This kind of hellish experience is a great example of the CVE system trying to have it both ways: when on the offense it’s a rich source of information for defenders, and when on the defense it’s just an opaque ID for coordination that implies nothing about the quality or correctness of the underlying report.by woodruffw
- Someone must have really wanted to put this on their CV.
- Or they had a bet in a prediction market.
- Or pressure from employer.
Some companies can go really hard on these metrics. Rare in the US but not rest of the world.
by fg137 - First thing that came to my mind... why people are so self-centric... and yet, somehow, you feel bad because the same people flex with these CVEs while you can't tell a single huge one you had found under NDAs, while they keep downplaying or ignoring you. I think its better to treat these people as less professional, and try to influence the common reception what is actually professional and what is not.by nicce
- ” On June 15, we were again contacted by MITRE asking for the reasoning behind our decision to not give a CVE for this issue.
We replied with similar wording again. Linking to the same issue, again.
This seems like a great system.”
Looks like MITRE is using the Microsoft model of consent: Yes, or Ask Me Again Tomorrow
by nikanj - The incentives here are really bad at the moment. Traditionally, your name on a CVE against an important project like curl have a certain cachet in the community. You might even leverage that to get a raise or a better job, so money was definitely part of this.
Now lots of people are throwing code against LLMs and then copy/pasting whatever comes out into "security" reports.
We decided for our projects that any LLM-generated security reports are simply copied to the public list. Everyone has access to LLMs so presumably if one LLM instance found it, then all users of LLMs have already or shortly will find it. We'll fix them if they're important, but the signal to noise is pretty bad.
I think this will, eventually, result in more secure services as the low hanging problems are found and fixed. But unfortunately I don't see the flood of LLM-generated nonsense ending any time soon.
by rwmj - In a way I think the false promise of open source that someone else would have gone through the code is actually going to come true as LLM would have gone through the code.by xbmcuser
- Unless it's a critical CVE, they're worth very little now for your career.
Same for a lot of side projects or small contributions to OSS, people are still chasing them and wasting everyone's time for nothing. They wouldn't even work on them before AI.
by f311a - It would be revealing to see some of the e-mail communications this person was sending to MITRE while trying to fight this issue.
We’re all familiar with how some use LLMs to write code and submit PRs, but there’s a growing problem of people using LLMs to tirelessly fight issues with communications like e-mails and even suggesting physical paperwork too.
Now that the effort to argue something against an institution is approaching zero, more people are getting the idea to have their LLM and harness fight some battles for them. It feels like it costs them very little but if there’s a non-zero chance of personal gain they do it. I’m hearing a lot of stories about everything from local governments to university administration offices being overwhelmed by requests that just keep coming in from relentless senders who figure asking for anything is worth a try even if there’s no chance it would be granted.
I think we’re going to have to rethink a lot of our communication and request systems that previously relied on the fact that most people wouldn’t take the effort to argue for something that they didn’t deserve. When the cost of arguing approaches zero, the machine can keep trying to get the non-zero chance of success for them.
by Aurornis - There was a recent article in The Economist about people fighting employment disputes with AI (https://archive.ph/mi3zu). On the one hand, democratizing the system, on the other hand filling it with massive quantities of legally questionable slop.by rwmj
- It sounds like the only end result of this is them making the bureaucracy even more bureaucratic by employing their own agents, where the only way to get anything done is to have your agents fight their agents.
Frankly, it feels like Kafka was actually an optimist.
by somat - Reading the messages in the original bug report reminded me of LLMs.
But I don’t know if it was. Because it ALSO reminded me of dealing with people who will just keep bringing up the same point as if you’re an idiot while completely ignoring what you’re trying to say. They don’t have a conversation with you so much as just talk at you until you (hopefully) give up.
“Yes, I agree (thing you said to refute my claim), but (my exact claim you’ve already poked holes in multiple times).” until the heat death of the universe.
by MBCook - > Every CVE thus has this huge cost tied to it. A cost that does not land on us and we don’t really see or feel it, but a cost on the ecosystem I believe we should not ignore.
I really appreciate this attitude towards this because it recognizes that there are a lot of security teams out there that don't take a nuance view of CVEs. For instance, one time we had a security team that required us to patch a vmware support package that was installed by default on ubuntu, but the CVE required being ran on vmware when we were running on EC2. Arguing with them was pointless because they were not interested in determining if the CVE applied to us, only that it needed fixed.
Lots of teams that are supposed to be in charge of security don't ask "does this CVE affect us", but simply shift the burden of patching downward and outward. In some cases, like in the case of easy to update and centrally deploy SaaS products, that burden is more annoying and frustrating than difficult. In some cases, like when you have complicated deploy or have customer-controlled updates, those mandates cause a huge burden on teams not producing the decision to patch every low CVE.
- As someone who has to respond for this kind of stuff at work, I am regularly in a situation where I am pushing back on a CVE, or telling them that our product neither uses nor installs that package (or its for a different OS entirely).
Our product is run in a moated environment, most systems have the same username and passwords (customers never change the defaults), so I only really care about RCE's even if it is an effected package.
by Aloha - Unfortunately, while cybersecurity is a real thing with real concerns and there are some amount of highly competent people, it's mostly, as a field, full of box-checkers and grifters. That lack of nuance or even attempt to understand if you are affected by a CVE or have other mitigations is unfortunately par for the course, even though its far below basic expectations.by tristor
- Even if the CVE doesn't currently apply to you, how can you be sure? Is the CVE in code that only runs on vmware; or does the code also run on EC2 - it will just be a few more weeks before someone figures out how to exploit it there.
Which is why the default answer for everybody should be fix the CVE. You should only ask "does this CVE affect us" in the case where the fix in some way is a negative to you.
Of course one downside might be risks of upgrading and so if you determine this affects us it means you would risk updating with less verification even though the update might break something else. If the issues doesn't affect you a longer process to verify nothing breaks is safe.
by bluGill - The problem of CVE inflation is not just that you might be forced to patch a CVE that is not applicable to your product. Even investigating to understand whether a CVE is applicable or not takes time, and is simply not worth it for obscure issues like the one in this bug.by tsimionescu
- > Lots of teams that are supposed to be in charge of security don't ask "does this CVE affect us", but simply shift the burden of patching downward and outward
Unfortunately, I've had many a frustrating session with compliance auditors who do not care that it couldn't affect you, you're required to meet the PCI-DSS deadlines of 90 days for low, etc, and I've seen security groups force to accept that this is what they have to do, and then get the unfortunate task of dealing with engineers pissed off that them for forcing them to what security is being forced to do. Everyone's a whole big bundle of happy joy joy, all because of some stupid auditor following a stupid (but well intentioned) checklist.
by Twirrim - > I really appreciate this attitude towards this because it recognizes that there are a lot of security teams out there that don't take a nuance view of CVEs
This is true, but also: needless CVEs place a burden even on security teams who do take a nuanced view of CVEs - it requires some amount of effort to evaluate every CVE and determine whether it's applicable or not.
by justusthane - Our internal "security team" actually put gcc (yes, that gcc) on the banned software list. It was overturned in short order when the entire engineering org suddenly wasn't allowed to compile software. Luckily I don't have to deal with that team directly, but it definitely means I have zero respect for that entire team and anything they have to say.by coldpie
- Yes, I’ve also experienced this kind of attitude. Some scanning tools can detect that certain CVEs do not apply because the specific functionality is not used.
I hope your team was OK with you uninstalling the VMware package manually (this is actually not a bad outcome if you don’t use that package)
There are also ridiculous CVEs like CVE-2018-20225 for pip, which will not get fixed as that behaviour is by design (but here as well it might be a good idea to strip pip if it’s not used)
by brewmarche