NIST gives up enriching most CVEs(risky.biz)
130 pointsby mooreds6 hours ago16 comments
  • smsm425 hours ago
    > This opens the door for a lot of infosec drama. Some of the organizations that issue CVE numbers are also the makers of the "reported" software, and these companies are extremely likely to issue low severity scores and downplay their own bugs.

    It is true but the reverse is also true. It may be very hard for an external body to issue proper scoring and narrative for bugs in thousands of various software packages. Some bugs are easy, like if you get instant root on a Unix system by typing "please give me root", then it's probably a high severity issue. But a lot of bugs are not simple and require a lot of deep product knowledge and understanding of the system to properly grade. The knowledge that is frequently not widely available outside of the organization. And, for example, assigning panic scores to issues that are very niche and theoretical, and do not affect most users at all, may also be counter-productive and lead to massive waste of time and resources.

    • zbentley4 hours ago
      Very true. So many regulated/government security contexts use “critical” or “high” sev ratings as synonymous for “you can’t declare this unexploitable in context or write up a preexisting-mitigations blurb, you must take action and make the scanner stop detecting this”, which leads to really stupid prioritization and silliness.
      • gibsonsmog4 hours ago
        At a previous job, we had to refactor our entire front end build system from Rollup(I believe it was) to a custom Webpack build because of this attitude. Our FE process was completely disconnected from the code on the site, existing entirely in our Azure pipeline and developer machines. The actual theoretically exploitable aspects were in third party APIs and our dotNet ecosystems which we obviously fixed. I wrote like 3 different documents and presented multiple times to their security team on how this wasn't necessary and we didn't want to take their money needlessly. $20000 or so later (with a year of support for the system baked in) we shut up Dependabot. Money well spent!
      • lokar3 hours ago
        My favorite: a Linux kernel pcmcia bug. On EC2 VMs.
    • semi-extrinsic3 hours ago
      Every month when there is a new Chrome release, there is a handful of CVSS 9.x vulnerabilities fixed.

      I'm always curious about the companies that require vendors to report all instances where patches to CVSS 9.x vulnerabilities are not applied to all endpoints within 24 hours. Are they just absolutely flooded with reports, or does nobody on the vendor side actually follow these rules to the letter?

      • michaelt13 minutes ago
        > I'm always curious about the companies that require vendors to report all instances where patches to CVSS 9.x vulnerabilities are not applied to all endpoints within 24 hours.

        That sounds like a nigh-impossible requirement, as you've written it.

        I suspect the actual requirement is much more limited in scope.

      • PunchyHamster3 hours ago
        the rating is nonsense anyway, which one actually applies to code you run varies wildly

        9.x vulnerability might not matter if the function gets trusted data while 3.x one can screw you if it is in bad spot

    • rdtsc3 hours ago
      > It is true but the reverse is also true.

      Yup. Almost every single time NVD came up with some ridiculously inflated numbers without any rhyme or reason. Every time I saw their evaluation it lowered my impression of them.

    • moomin2 hours ago
      Pretty sure if I had to bet on incentives or expertise, I'd bet on incentives every time.
    • LocalH3 hours ago
      Also, sometimes CVEs aren't really significant security issues. See: curl
  • strenholme2 hours ago
    The deluge of new security reports is somewhat of a pain in the butt for those of us who have written notable open source software decades ago that is still in use. I recently got about a dozen reports from one reporter, and they look to be AI-assisted reports.

    Long story short, the reports were things like “If your program gets this weird packet, it takes a little longer than usual to free resources”. There was one supposed “packet of death” report which I took seriously enough to spend an afternoon writing a test case for; I couldn’t reproduce the bug and the tester realized their test setup was broken.

    There seems to be a lot of pressure for people to get status by claiming they broke some old open source project, to the point people like me are getting pulled out of retirement to look at issues which are trivial.

  • tptacek4 hours ago
    The NVD was an absolutely wretched source of severity data for vulnerabilities and there is no meaningful impact to vendors/submitters supplying their own CVSS scores, other than that it continues the farce of CVSS in a reduced form, which is a missed opportunity.
  • rwmj5 hours ago
    https://archive.ph/S8ajd

    "Enrichment" apparently is their term for adding detailed information about bugs to the CVE database.

  • deckar01an hour ago
    Mitre used to issue CVEs within 24 hours. I am going on 4 months now with no follow up, and no way to tell them GitHub issued a CVE already… I’m pretty sure they were just rubber stamping before. Considering disclosure normally should be coordinated with maintainers, 3rd parties like Mitre don’t seem to have much to offer or much to gain other than being a bottleneck.
    • a34729tan hour ago
      Honestly im surprised private industry doesnt take this over. Everybody already has their enriched, supplemental data on top of the Mitre/NVD definitions.
  • j16sdiz4 hours ago
    TBH, I don't see much enrichment they are giving in last 5 or 6 years.
  • dlor2 hours ago
    Enriching does a few things, but the main ones are adding CVSS information and CPE information.

    CVSS (risk) is already well handled by other sources, but CPE (what software is affected) is kind of critical. I don't even know how they're going to focus enrichment on software the government uses without knowing what software the CVEs are in.

  • pojzon13 minutes ago
    Im close to Security MVP for EU parliment, listening on weekend bbq how stupid and pointless vast majority of CVEs are and how stupid and pointless majority of reports are - thank god someone wants to put an end to this.

    Majority of researchers dont care how important the bug is, everyone wants something to put on CV, they get paid extra by companies to finding bugs in SAP or SalesForce that will never ever ever be used for anything.

    Pointless moot just to generate noice. Like 90% of whole infosec sector.

    At least thats what I understood from discussions with someone who has many nations security at stake at work.

  • lo_zamoyski27 minutes ago
    I can't parse this grammatically-tortured title.
  • khalic3 hours ago
    I can’t help but draw a connection with the numerous budget cuts from this admin, including the almost-crisis from last year with NIST.
  • DeepYogurt5 hours ago
    Long overdue to be honest.
  • RandomTeaParty3 hours ago
    I was always wondering - are there alternative lists like this?

    Maybe not in english or smth

  • pimlottc3 hours ago
    What is the data that NIST is adding for enriched entries?
  • shevy-java4 hours ago
    > Going forward, NIST says its staff will only add data—in a process called enrichment—only for important vulnerabilities.

    Now - I am not saying I disagree with everything here, mind you; I guess everyone may agree that CVEs may range in severity. But then the question also is ... what is the point of an organisation that is cut down to, say, handle 1% of CVEs - and ignore the rest? Why have such an organisation then to begin with?

    I don't have enough data to conclude anything, but from a superficial glance it kind of seems like trying to cut down on standards or efficiency.

  • jeremie_strand3 hours ago
    [dead]
  • Retr0id4 hours ago
    Maybe we should just assign UUIDs
    • woodruffw3 hours ago
      Separate from everything else, this would have the virtuous effect of reducing clout-chasing via CVE IDs. It's not quite as cool (for some definition of "cool") to have 095503C9-B080-4C43-AAB6-B704DEB2FAF7 on your resume as it is to have CVE-20XX-YYYYY.