alt Hacker News> note that _any_ bugfix is assigned a cve
I do find it interesting though, that in the interest of transparency, every bugfix gets a CVE. Which ends up being a huge number… which will ultimately yield a more insecure environment as we’re getting conditioned to ignore/discount CVEs by the volume.
Over-reporting in this case seems to risk being counterproductive.
Replies
Counterproductive for whom? The stance of the kernel developers is that whether a bug is a vulnerability or not depends on intended use. They say, we do not dictate use, therefore this decision is out of scope for us. This makes kernel development more focussed and productive.
I would argue that it is more productive for the enduser as well. Not making a decision they cannot reasonably make is better then blindly believing in a decision that is likely wrong for your usecase.
Depends on the end consumers stance on security. I've watched it shift from "Only update if we can prove we are impacted" to "Update everything immediately just in case".
The frequency and severity of cyber attacks has increased to the point a much more cautious approach has become common. It's also easier to sell this work to management when you can point at the security tab on some tool and say "Look we need to patch these CVEs"
They chose to do it this way, in. part, because CVEs were already like that, and too many people were pretending they weren't.
It's not very interesting. Linus, and by extension the Linux kernel, long had a dismissive attitude toward security research. This is basically a childish swing from one extreme (nothing gets a CVE) to another (everything gets a CVE).
Kernel development is well-funded, both via grants and by direct employment at big tech companies, and if they wanted to properly triage and annotate vulnerabilities, and provide reasonable assessments of what is or isn't likely to be a security risk, they absolutely could. They almost certainly could go to Google and say "we need two people full-time on your payroll for this" and they would get it.
I don't want to dunk on them too much because they're generally doing God's work, but these absolutist security stances are not worth being taken seriously.
It's basically saying that they can't possibly provide a valuable service for 99.999% of the install base because there might a hypothetical person out there using Linux in a really weird way. If Microsoft tried to make an argument like that, they'd get crucified.