alt Hacker News> 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.
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> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)