A CVE Dispute

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Someone must have really wanted to put this on their CV.

” 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

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.

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> it means that every CVE we publish trigger activities in many security teams all over the world, leading to a significant number of patches and subsequent software updates.

If it's just about that, fix those low priority issues and bundle them along with the next higher-priority fix pack, i.e. "lower than low" -> fix but not release immediately; "medium" or higher -> release with any earlier unreleased "lower than low" fixes.

Seeing how much energy you spent in dismissing the person's report on the "lower than low" vuln in https://hackerone.com/reports/3455037, it'd be easier and faster to just fix it rather than argue...