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Re: Rough Drafts of CVE Counting Documents

Thank you Chris. It sounds reasonably prudent to gain experience and provide the most needed hardware-related identifiers while leaving enough flexibility to formally increase the scope and commit to it later if desired. 

Pascal

On 08/30/2016 02:07 PM, Coffin, Chris wrote:

Pascal,

These are great observations and I do agree with your point of view. I have spent
a good part of yesterday and today thinking about the best way to address this.
One way to handle it might be to leave the door open in regards to hardware, in
other words, just state that "some" hardware is included. This allows
us to reserve the right to refuse assignments for hardware specific issues like
the ones you mentioned. I have crafted a new version of the description below
that may or may not satisfy your current concerns in this regard.

Like Kurt had added, requesters will still have to ask CNAs for CVEs
and the CNAs don't have to provide them in cases where it isn't
applicable or doesn't make sense. Additionally, we could add an
inclusion decision that could specifically exclude certain situations
(e.g., environmental impacts to hardware, etc.).

#3
"A vulnerability in the context of the CVE program, is defined as a
weakness in the computational logic (e.g., code) found in software and some
hardware components (e.g., firmware),  and when exploited results in a
negative impact to confidentiality, integrity, OR availability. Mitigation
of the vulnerabilities in this context typically involve coding changes, but
could also include specification changes or even specification deprecations
(e.g., removal of affected protocols or functionality in their entirety).

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Pascal Meunier [mailto:pmeunier@cerias.purdue.edu]
Sent: Monday, August 29, 2016 2:10 PM
To: Coffin, Chris <ccoffin@mitre.org>; Kurt Seifried <kseifried@redhat.com>;
Booth, Harold (Fed) <harold.booth@nist.gov>
Cc: cve-editorial-board-list <cve-editorial-board-list@lists.mitre.org>
Subject: Re: Rough Drafts of CVE Counting Documents


The change to #1 and #2, and even more with the other change suggested by Kurt
("weakness in the system"), would greatly increase the scope for the CVE.  CNAs
will issue CVEs for any and all hardware vulnerable to the "row hammer effect",
for example, and not just for the software that is particularly vulnerable (e.g.,
CVE-2015-0565).  This could create an explosion of IDs requests, as some hardware
combinations may make things worse or better -- will we keep track of all combinations?
Next we'll get ID requests for overclocked hardware (if overclocking is allowed), or
hardware under borderline or unusual temperatures, dirty hardware, under brownouts and for
every device that hangs, crashes or reboots because it could indicate a vulnerability.
Will boards that have common chips be grouped under the same CVE ID?  How different is
different enough so you'll issue 2 or 2000 different IDs?  The counting document doesn't
address hardware, I think.  It seems we just almost stumbled and now we want to tackle a
parcours du combattant.

Changing too much too quickly can be a recipe for disaster, or at least
great confusion and inadequacy.  I suggest pacing ourselves a bit (pun
intended) and waiting until the recent changes prove themselves viable
and stable before making such a change of scope.  At least, the change
in scope for the project should be something planned and directly
decided upon instead of being incidental to revising a definition.

As a very minor wording comment, of little importance compared to the above, I
think that the inclusion of "by a threat source," doesn't help and
could be removed.

Pascal



On 08/29/2016 02:01 PM, Coffin, Chris wrote:

All,

Harold Booth and I had a couple of private exchanges regarding the vulnerability
definition for the CNA Counting document. The following is the current definition as
proposed by Pascal, as well as two of the most current iterations from Harold and I.
The difference is obviously in the second sentence which covers both Kurt’s
and Pascal’s original comments. I think we are leaning more towards the second
version since it stays focused on the weakness aspect of the definition. Any thoughts
on this would be hugely appreciated.

#0.1 (current definition from Pascal)
“A vulnerability in the context of the CVE program, is indicated by code that
can be exploited, resulting in a negative impact to confidentiality, integrity, OR
availability, and that requires a coding change, specification change or
specification deprecation to mitigate or address.”

#1
“A vulnerability in the context of the CVE program, is defined as any weakness
in the computational logic (e.g., code) found in software or hardware devices, that
could be exploited by a threat source, and result in a negative impact to the
security of a system. Mitigation of the vulnerabilities in this context typically
involve coding changes, but could also include specification changes or even
specification deprecations (e.g., removal of affected protocols or functionality in
their entirety).”

#2
“A vulnerability in the context of the CVE program, is defined as any weakness
in the computational logic (e.g., code) found in software or hardware devices, that
could be exploited by a threat source, and result in a negative impact to the
security of a system. A non-exhaustive list of examples where a weakness in logic
could be found is in the specification of a protocol, description of an algorithm,
design or architecture of a product, implementation, circuit layout, or fabrication
of the product.”

Thanks Harold!

Chris

From: Kurt Seifried [mailto:kseifried@redhat.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 25, 2016 1:15 PM
To: Coffin, Chris <ccoffin@mitre.org>
Cc: cve-editorial-board-list
<cve-editorial-board-list@lists.mitre.org>
Subject: Re: Rough Drafts of CVE Counting Documents



On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 10:21 AM, Coffin, Chris
<ccoffin@mitre.org<mailto:ccoffin@mitre.org>> wrote:
Kurt,

Thanks a ton for the feedback... I very much appreciate it.

FYI... I hadn't taken into account Pascal's feedback in the comments
below, but I added Pascal's definition of vulnerability as I think it
works very well. Thanks Pascal!



Could we add "typically requires" instead?


I added some text to the definition. Take a look and let me know if
this works for you.


Can INC2 (Vendor acknowledgement) be expanded to include actual
verification through a proof of concept/reproducer for example, or via
source code examination?


I would be concerned with putting strict verification requirements at
the inclusion stage. For vendor CNAs, I think they will most likely do
some or all of this, and maybe we can insert this language here that
mentions it. However, there may also be other CNAs reading this
decision who are not the vendor or maintainer of the product/code and
assembling this data or getting it from the vendor could take time if
it happens at all. My feeling is that the inclusion steps should
emphasize speed in assigning CVE IDs as opposed to getting things
perfect up front. If a mistake is made, it can be cleaned up after the
fact. Thoughts?

Sorry I meant that as OR, not AND, e.g. someone publishes a script that
crashes a Linux machine and we have no idea why yet, I would say that
should get a CVE asap.



INC3.1 "demonstrated" does this mean we need a reproducer?


Similar to the above, for a vendor CNA following this it is probably not much of
an issue. For a CNA who is not the vendor or maintainer, such as yourself, this
becomes more important obviously. I think you have said yourself that you get
lots of garbage already. In my mind, "demonstrated" means can the
requester properly describe the vulnerability and explain what it's impact is. I
think if we force the requester to provide a PoC we may be asking for too much at
this stage. As the bolded text states, this one is about trusting the researcher
in their claim to a certain extent.

Ok, just wanted to make asure we were using the same value of
"Demonstrated" =)



INC4: can we better define public/private? E.g. what if a medical
device maker plans to use a CVE for an issue that they will then inform
ever user of directly? Ditto for aerospace/SCADA/etc.


Are you saying that we should soften language now to start including
room for CVEs issues that will only be released to a limited group of
users? I know we have had these discussions in the recent past, but my
understanding was that we would wait to make this kind of change until
CVE actually brought on some of these domains where this issue will
come up.

I think we need to start looking at this and be ready to have in answer
probably within the year or early next year, especially if we want to
expand CVE to these industry types as I suspect they will have
questions at a minimum.



INC5: "CVE IDs are assigned to products that are customer-controlled or
customer-installable." what about on premises solutions that are locked down? I know
many medical devices, high end manufacturing, etc you buy it, but you don't touch it, the
company tech services it. Ditto for other regulated items like elevators (contractually
most elevator maintenance involves a "if anyone but us touches it, your warranty is
totally void").


This is a really great point! This is another area that I haven't really put much
thought into and I don't think anyone else on the board has brought up in the
recent past. Outside of the "sort of" similar idea of SaaS (and
possibly other xaaS), I imagine there could be IT products (e.g., appliances and
such) produced now or in the future that could fall into this category. Similar
to the above comments though, should we account for this in the current rules, or
should we wait until presented with this problem such as when we bring on the
medical devices domain?

Again above, I think we should look into this and have an answer sooner
rather then later.


 > CNT4: I'd like to better define the embedded code situation, e.g.
libxml/gzip situations (bits of those are everywhere!).

One thing that I noticed is that the decision language did not direct
the CNA to defer the report to the appropriate CNA in the case of a
shared codebase that doesn't apply to the receiving CNA (i.e., the CNA
following the decisions based on the report). Are you looking for more
process explanation in this case or maybe more examples? If you have
anything specific please feel free to pass along.

So for example where does code move from "Same codebase" to "different code
base", e.g. mysql/various forks, embedded copies of X (gzip for example), I think one good sniff
test is "does the patch work with no or minimal changes"?



Chris


From: Kurt Seifried
[mailto:kseifried@redhat.com<mailto:kseifried@redhat.com>]
Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2016 3:55 PM
To: Coffin, Chris <ccoffin@mitre.org<mailto:ccoffin@mitre.org>>
Cc: cve-editorial-board-list
<cve-editorial-board-list@lists.mitre.org<mailto:cve-editorial-board-l
ist@lists.mitre.org>>
Subject: Re: Rough Drafts of CVE Counting Documents

Some feedback:
A vulnerability in the context of the CVE program, is code that can be
exploited, resulting in a negative impact to confidentiality,
integrity, and availability, and that requires a code change to
mitigate or address.
Some vulns are internal to the protocol and the only code change that "fixes" it
is to remove the code/functionality altogether. Could we add "typically requires"
instead? I'm worried about the intersection of software/API vulns that will become
increasingly common (more instances of this, and people will start looking for them).
Can INC2 (Vendor acknowledgement) be expanded to include actual
verification through a proof of concept/reproducer for example, or via
source code examination?
INC3.1 "demonstrated" does this mean we need a reproducer?
INC4: can we better define public/private? E.g. what if a medical
device maker plans to use a CVE for an issue that they will then inform
ever user of directly? Ditto for aerospace/SCADA/etc.
INC5: "CVE IDs are assigned to products that are customer-controlled or
customer-installable." what about on premises solutions that are locked down? I know
many medical devices, high end manufacturing, etc you buy it, but you don't touch it, the
company tech services it. Ditto for other regulated items like elevators (contractually
most elevator maintenance involves a "if anyone but us touches it, your warranty is
totally void").
CNT4: I'd like to better define the embedded code situation, e.g.
libxml/gzip situations (bits of those are everywhere!).










On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 2:19 PM, Coffin, Chris
<mailto:ccoffin@mitre.org<mailto:ccoffin@mitre.org>> wrote:
All,

Attached is a new version of the CVE Counting for CNAs document. I
have made some changes to the counting decisions as well as provided
some clarifications in certain decisions based on feedback from the CVE
Team.

Chris

From:
mailto:owner-cve-editorial-board-list@lists.mitre.org<mailto:owner-cve
-editorial-board-list@lists.mitre.org>
[mailto:mailto<mailto:mailto>:owner-cve-editorial-board-list@lists.mit
re.org<mailto:owner-cve-editorial-board-list@lists.mitre.org>] On
Behalf Of Coffin, Chris
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2016 5:03 PM
To: cve-editorial-board-list
<mailto:cve-editorial-board-list@lists.mitre.org<mailto:cve-editorial-
board-list@lists.mitre.org>>
Subject: Rough Drafts of CVE Counting Documents

All,

Sorry for the delay, these were supposed to go out last week.

Attached is the latest marked up version of the Simplified Counting
Rules, as well as the promised very rough version of a new CVE
Vulnerability Counting for CNAs document. There is still plenty of work
to be done on this new document, but the main focus so far has been to
develop the decision trees. The included decision trees are meant to
replace the older decision trees found at
https://github.com/CVEProject/docs/blob/gh-pages/cna/application-guidance.md.

Current thinking is that the introduction of the “independently fixable”
concept obsoletes many of the older counting decisions, but we’d be interested to
hear others opinions on this. Also, the inclusion rules actually grew a bit, but these all
seem to be fairly straightforward.

The Report Type decision is something that came up during internal discussions
and is probably new to everyone. An earlier version of the doc didn’t
have good coverage for how to count when independently fixable resulted in No
or Not Sure. The Report Type allows for common reporting cases to be handled
in a somewhat uniform way. The idea is to handle the most common reports and
the recommended counting action for each. We are definitely interested in
hearing others thoughts on this entire counting decision, as well as the
common reports and actions that are defined.

Like I said before, this is a very early version so I am open to any
and all feedback. Thanks in advance!

Chris Coffin
The CVE Team




--

--
Kurt Seifried -- Red Hat -- Product Security -- Cloud PGP A90B F995
7350 148F 66BF 7554 160D 4553 5E26 7993 Red Hat Product Security
contact: mailto:secalert@redhat.com<mailto:secalert@redhat.com>



--

--
Kurt Seifried -- Red Hat -- Product Security -- Cloud PGP A90B F995
7350 148F 66BF 7554 160D 4553 5E26 7993 Red Hat Product Security
contact: secalert@redhat.com<mailto:secalert@redhat.com>
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