1 _ _ ____ _ 2 ___| | | | _ \| | 3 / __| | | | |_) | | 4 | (__| |_| | _ <| |___ 5 \___|\___/|_| \_\_____| 6 7CURL SECURITY FOR DEVELOPERS 8 9This document is intended to provide guidance to curl developers on how 10security vulnerabilities should be handled. 11 12PUBLISHING INFORMATION 13 14All known and public curl or libcurl related vulnerabilities are listed at 15http://curl.haxx.se/docs/security.html 16 17Security vulnerabilities should not be entered in the project's public bug 18tracker unless the necessary configuration is in place to limit access to the 19issue to only the reporter and the project's security team. 20 21VULNERABILITY HANDLING 22 23The typical process for handling a new security vulnerability is as follows. 24 25No information should be made public about a vulnerability until it is 26formally announced at the end of this process. That means, for example that a 27bug tracker entry must NOT be created to track the issue since that will make 28the issue public and it should not be discussed on any of the project's public 29mailing lists. Also messages associated with any commits should not make 30any reference to the security nature of the commit if done prior to the public 31announcement. 32 33- The person discovering the issue, the reporter, reports the vulnerability 34 privately to curl-security@haxx.se. That's an email alias that reaches a 35 handful of selected and trusted people. 36 37- Messages that do not relate to the reporting or managing of an undisclosed 38 security vulnerability in curl or libcurl are ignored and no further action 39 is required. 40 41- A person in the security team sends an e-mail to the original reporter to 42 acknowledge the report. 43 44- The security team investigates the report and either rejects it or accepts 45 it. 46 47- If the report is rejected, the team writes to the reporter to explain why. 48 49- If the report is accepted, the team writes to the reporter to let him/her 50 know it is accepted and that they are working on a fix. 51 52- The security team discusses the problem, works out a fix, considers the 53 impact of the problem and suggests a release schedule. This discussion 54 should involve the reporter as much as possible. 55 56- The release of the information should be "as soon as possible" and is most 57 often synced with an upcoming release that contains the fix. If the 58 reporter, or anyone else, thinks the next planned release is too far away 59 then a separate earlier release for security reasons should be considered. 60 61- Write a security advisory draft about the problem that explains what the 62 problem is, its impact, which versions it affects, solutions or 63 workarounds, when the release is out and make sure to credit all 64 contributors properly. 65 66- Request a CVE number from distros@openwall.org[1] when also informing and 67 preparing them for the upcoming public security vulnerability announcement - 68 attach the advisory draft for information. Note that 'distros' won't accept 69 an embargo longer than 19 days. 70 71- Update the "security advisory" with the CVE number. 72 73- The security team commits the fix in a private branch. The commit message 74 should ideally contain the CVE number. This fix is usually also distributed 75 to the 'distros' mailing list to allow them to use the fix prior to the 76 public announcement. 77 78- At the day of the next release, the private branch is merged into the master 79 branch and pushed. Once pushed, the information is accessible to the public 80 and the actual release should follow suit immediately afterwards. 81 82- The project team creates a release that includes the fix. 83 84- The project team announces the release and the vulnerability to the world in 85 the same manner we always announce releases. It gets sent to the 86 curl-announce, curl-library and curl-users mailing lists. 87 88- The security web page on the web site should get the new vulnerability 89 mentioned. 90 91[1] = http://oss-security.openwall.org/wiki/mailing-lists/distros 92