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CVE Stuffing

jerrygamblin.com

11–20 of 108 posts

Re: CVE Stuffing

#11
post #6

I'm a command-line development tools maintainer for an OS. I am not unfamiliar with high-level CVEs in my inbox with the likes of "gdb crashes on a handcrafted core file causing a DoS". I am unfamiliar with a real world in which a simple old-fashioned segfault in a crash analysis tool is truly a denial of service security vulnerability, but our security department assures us we need to drop all revenue work and rush…

[deleted]

Re: CVE Stuffing

#12
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a way to return a custom 404 error handler for .git and a different one for a regular 404 in Apache? Never tried that before.

Check the ErrorDocument directive for .htaccess files.

That directive doesn't have to reside in .htaccess files. It works just as well inside a Directory, Virtual Host and Server contexts as well.

    ErrorDocument 404 /404.php
    
    
        ErrorDocument 404 "Ah ah ah! You didn't say the magic word"
    

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/core.html#errordocumen...

Re: CVE Stuffing

#13
That sucks. Perhaps the most annoying part of modern infosec is the absolute deluge of noise you get from scanning tools. Superfluous CVEs like this contribute to the sea of red security engineers wake up to when they look at their dashboards. Unsurprisingly, these are eventually mostly ignored.

Every large security organization requires scanning tooling like Coalfire, Checkmarx, Fortify and Nessus, but I've rarely seen them used in an actionable way. Good security teams come up with their own (effective) ways of tracking new security incidents or vastly filtering the output of these tools.

The current state of CVEs and CVE scanning is that you'll have to wrangle with bullshit security reports if you run any nontrivial software. This is especially the case if you have significant third party JavaScript libraries or images. And unfortunately you can't just literally ignore it, because infrequently one of those red rows in the dashboard will actually represent something like Heartbleed.

Re: CVE Stuffing

#14
post #6

I'm a command-line development tools maintainer for an OS. I am not unfamiliar with high-level CVEs in my inbox with the likes of "gdb crashes on a handcrafted core file causing a DoS". I am unfamiliar with a real world in which a simple old-fashioned segfault in a crash analysis tool is truly a denial of service security vulnerability, but our security department assures us we need to drop all revenue work and rush…

Maybe you can get on the phone with your customers, their security teams, and their compliance teams and explain every single day why these known vulnerabilities are not serious and can never be leveraged. You can convince them all of these latent bugs will never pose a serious risk. You can do this all day every day. Or you can just patch, and maintain a capability to do so quickly because bugs don't just affect security and the inability to update dependencies is really a reflection of awful development practices.

Re: CVE Stuffing

#15
I remember when people in the security community started filing CVEs against the TensorFlow project, claiming that code execution was possible with a handcrafted TensorFlow graph, and the team would have to try and explain, "TensorFlow GraphDefs are code".

Re: CVE Stuffing

#16

Way back when I saw a report on hackernews about secret exposure from websites that deployed directly via a git repo as a webroot and didn't block access to .git/ I added a cheeky message to my site's .git/ folder if you attempted to view it. About 2 or 3 months later I started getting "security reports" to the catch all, about an exposed git folder that was leaking my website's secrets. Apparently because my site di…

> I have a feeling CNAs are bringing this kind of low effort zero regard for false positive fatigue bullshit to CVEs.

Yes, being the discoverer of a CVE is a major resume item. Pen testers who have a CVE to their name can charge more. Companies can charge more for sending them.

Re: CVE Stuffing

#17

That sucks. Perhaps the most annoying part of modern infosec is the absolute deluge of noise you get from scanning tools. Superfluous CVEs like this contribute to the sea of red security engineers wake up to when they look at their dashboards. Unsurprisingly, these are eventually mostly ignored. Every large security organization requires scanning tooling like Coalfire, Checkmarx, Fortify and Nessus, but I've rarely s…

> The current state of CVEs and CVE scanning is that you'll have to wrangle with bullshit security reports if you run any nontrivial software.

Especially if you have customers who outsourced their infosec to the lowest bidder who insist every BS CVE is critical and must be fixed.

Re: CVE Stuffing

#18
The whole problem is that at some point people started seeing CVEs as an achievement, as "if I get a CVE it means I found a REAL VULN". While really CVEs should just be seen as an identifier. It means multiple people talking about the same vuln know they're talking about the same vuln. It means if you read an advisory about CVE-xxx-yyy you can ask the vendor of your software if they already have a patch for that.

It simply says nothing about whether a vuln is real, relevant or significant.

Re: CVE Stuffing

#19
post #6

I'm a command-line development tools maintainer for an OS. I am not unfamiliar with high-level CVEs in my inbox with the likes of "gdb crashes on a handcrafted core file causing a DoS". I am unfamiliar with a real world in which a simple old-fashioned segfault in a crash analysis tool is truly a denial of service security vulnerability, but our security department assures us we need to drop all revenue work and rush…

Ah yes, this also fits with the famous "no insecure algorithms" in which an auditor will check a box if your use md5, even if for a feature totally unrelated to security.

Re: CVE Stuffing

#20
post #6

I'm a command-line development tools maintainer for an OS. I am not unfamiliar with high-level CVEs in my inbox with the likes of "gdb crashes on a handcrafted core file causing a DoS". I am unfamiliar with a real world in which a simple old-fashioned segfault in a crash analysis tool is truly a denial of service security vulnerability, but our security department assures us we need to drop all revenue work and rush…

Maybe you can get on the phone with your customers, their security teams, and their compliance teams and explain every single day why these known vulnerabilities are not serious and can never be leveraged. You can convince them all of these latent bugs will never pose a serious risk. You can do this all day every day. Or you can just patch, and maintain a capability to do so quickly because bugs don't just affect sec…

It's sad, however, when a highly non-exploitable crash is treated as a five alarm fire while a "silently corrupts users data" falls to the wayside because people don't generally write security vulnerability reports for those.

I've heard from some people that they have considered filing security CVEs against non-security but high user impact bugs in software that they're working on, just to regain control of priorities from CVE spammers.

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