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Not so; companies like RHEL understand the importance of disclosure timelines and won't leak it early.

The importance of telling large distros doesn't lie in them immediately releasing a fix; it lies in them being able to prepare a package with the fix before the announcement, and then exactly when the announcement happens, they can publish the package (and possibly do something to make it propagate faster to their distribution servers)

As is, when Heartbleed was announced, many distros took an hour or significantly more to offer a fixed package. Proof-of-concept exploits were also made in that time. That was a dangerous situation.

I fully expect critical vulnerabilities that are "responsibly disclosed" to be reported to major distros so that packages can be prepared, but not released, in advance; furthermore, it allows people to be ready when it's announced at an agreed-upon date so that the packages can be pushed to live.

I'd actually be okay with a system where smaller distros which use similar packaging formats to larger ones are alerted with "There is an exploit. We will publish a fixed package that will likely be compatible with your distro on DATE. Be awake then to make sure these changes go live quickly, not when one key dude wakes up in 5 hours".

Sorry for the long-winded comment. What I really wanted to do is just explain "no way to share ... deploy a fix ... without making it public" is not the reason for sharing. The reason for sharing is so that the fix can be deployed more quickly when it is deployed.



It doesn't matter if they show "responsibly disclosed" all their repos are publicly available to see, it takes one person looking through commits then going wtf is this followed by a quick look at the code and a blog post to make this a wildfire.


Every major linux distro has a procedure in place for discreetly preparing updates for pre-disclosure security flaws.


It only takes one person on any of these teams to leak the details and the cat is out of the bag, and then the scramble is on.

Considering the circumstances, it appears that the process that was followed with regards to the release was as flawless as it could have been.


If this is really the case, there is no excuse.


I think the notion is the distro security team codes and tests a patch, but doesn't commit the code to public repos or release the patch publicly until an agreed-upon disclosure date.


Not necessarily that the distro security team codes the patch even. In most cases, upstream (e.g. openssl here) should have an official patch/commit that is private, but is given to these trusted distros. The security team only has to create a package with the upstream patch.

Other than that, yes, that's exactly the notion.




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