alt Hacker NewsI think the most practical reason not to flag which bugs are security bugs is to avoid helping blackhat hackers by painting a giant neon sign and that should be more than enough.
I think all the other explanations are just double-think. Why? If "bugs are just bugs" is really a true sentiment, why is there a separate disclosure process for security bugs? What does it even mean to classify a bug as a security bug during reporting if it's no different than any other bug report? Why are fixes developed in secret & potential embargoes sometimes invoked? I guess some bugs are more equal than others?
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> I think the most practical reason not to flag which bugs are security bugs is to avoid helping blackhat hackers by painting a giant neon sign and that should be more than enough.
It doesn't work. I've looked at the kernel commit log and found vulnerabilities that aren't announced/ marked. Attackers know how to do this. Not announcing is a pure negative.
As mentioned in the article, every bug is potentially a security problem to someone.
If you know that something is a security issue to your organization, you definitely don't want to paint a target on your back by reporting the bug publicly with an email address <your_name>@<your_org>.com. In the end, it is really actually quite rare (given the size of the code base and the popularity of linux) that a bug has a very wide security impact.
The vast majority of security issues don't affect organizations that are serious about security (yes really, SELinux eliminates or seriously reduces the impact of the vast majority of security bugs).