The disclosure process was terrible, they clearly had no time to perform a thorough validation of the hotfixes, and this is the result. Why didn't anybody else step up to help them? Did any of the large companies using log4j pour some thousand dollars into the Apache foundation to let a couple of security-oriented engineers take a complete review of the patches?
But then, it's log4j developers and Apache that should be blamed. Bah. That's SO pretentious.
Even with proper disclosure, patching can be harder than it seems at face value. Take shellshock (the bash RCE from 2014) for example, the first patch was released a week after discovery and publication happened after the patch was released. Yet there were still a flurry of further CVEs found and further emergency patches required as a result.
The problem is once a major vulnerability is discovered, you then have a the worldwide attention focused on that specific vulnerability looking for other ways to break it. So it’s not really a surprise that you find multiple CVEs for most major vulnerabilities.
Decent logging is surprisingly complicated, but it's not "We need an arrrchitecturreee! for infinitely configurable logging or we are utterly doomed" complicated.
> who should get the blame? The users?
If you leverage a ton of open source deps, shit is going to happen. You should not blame anyone.
But if you must, yes: blame the users that choose such piss-poor software.
People keep singing the praises of FOSS, but yet whenever this kind of shit happens, it's always the user's fault for choosing poorly which packages are being used. I'm saying that the original devs are criminals, but they did the original sin here. The fault ultimately lies at their feet. Why is this such a unrespected point of view?
What original sin? What fault? You’re basically saying that log4j developers lured you into temptation, otherwise you would have coded your own logging library, which, for sure, would have been better.
I haven’t seen 1/100 of this hatred for Apple iMessage vuln that led to NSO zero-click exploits, and I don’t get why.
I think there are a few reasons for this, and most of them aren’t based on logic, but emotion.
First, as bad as the NSO zero-click exploits are, they aren’t things that developers were potentially injecting into their own projects. So there is an easier force to “blame” — Apple (for making the mistakes in the first place — and to be clear, all software can have bugs) and NSO Group (for being pieces of shit) — whereas if you either chose Log4j for your own project, or more likely, chose a project/product that chose to use Log4j, the “who to blame” question becomes a lot less comfortable to answer.
At least with the NSO thing, there is a face of who the bad guy is. So it’s easy to sort of not hate Apple, provided Apple patched exploits as soon as they found them. That doesn’t mean that Apple, a company that has used its “better” security relative to its competitors one of its marketing messages, gets off easy. It’s a black mark for them for sure and will make it harder for the company to argue that it is so much more secure than x, y, z service or platform.
With Log4j, similar to OpenSSL, people have to grapple with the reality that they don’t really know a lot about a lot of the code they run — and even worse, acknowledge that they aren’t capable of understanding or auditing that code themselves. I certainly don’t understand a lot of the code and libraries I rely on for things I build. And if I really stop to think about that, that’s scary. Fortunately, my own projects are personal and aren’t taking data from others. But facing that reality can be a difficult pill to swallow. And Log4j is even worse than OpenSSL in a way, because one could be forgiven for having trust in a well-respected cryptographic library, and for not having a deep understanding of how that library works. But having an insecure logging library? That almost feels avoidable — even if it isn’t.
So people want to blame someone. And when it looks like the code — made by volunteers or not — wasn’t the best written, that’s an easy thing to go to. Rather than self-reflecting about all the libraries we use every day that we don’t think about the security or code quality of.
It doesn’t help that the disclosure, for a host of reasons, wasn’t good. That isn’t me blaming the Log4j team, it just is what it is. Disclosure wasn’t great and the fury to patch made some mistakes and now that there is outsized attention on the library, even more vulnerabilities have been found. Which is all understandable and indicative of what often happens in high stress situations.
Ultimately, we should all accept that mistakes happen and that this wasn’t done out of malice. We all have some level of culpability for what we choose to use in our projects. But mistakes happen.
And as you say, discussion is OK but disrespect isn’t. But I think we see lashing out because people want to find someone to blame.
No, I would never use a logging library, so there was no luring. If you want to call those that did use it lured, then you're already coming at it that the original software devs were coniving.
Come to think of it, they wouldn't even have to search for any exploits. Just ask devs nicely to put the backdoor in and be done with it.
That’s an unbelievable stretch. I wonder how your mind works.
> Who should get the blame then, the users? Duh, no.
And then you say:
> I don't use the code, so why in the world should I be expected to fix the code? Do you use the code? Why didn't YOU fix it?
Just take a step back, stop trying to throw shade at anyone and everyone, and look at the situation analytically.
I don't really see the point of these comments. The people who make a contribution to the world are the people who see a problem and take practical steps to fix it and improve the situation, rather than the people who see a problem and immediately descend into finger-pointing and shouting.
And released it with NO WARRANTY. And no mega corp thought it’d be a good idea to try and buy one.
> To me, this is the pretentious part. I didn't write the code, I don't use the code, so why in the world should I be expected to fix the code? Do you use the code? Why didn't YOU fix it?
If you don’t use it, then noone’s expecting you to fix anything. But those out there using it for free, complaining that it’s broken, and not doing anything to help? They should hush their hush holes. Or open pull requests. But mostly hush their hush holes.
How could they be expected to? Reviewing all of the source code for log4j is not a walk in the park. Even if you thoroughly reviewed all the source code, would this specific exploit have crossed your mind?
The game theory and assumptions around a "logging" library probably led a lot of organizations to not even consider it a potential threat and focus their efforts elsewhere.
There is also the transitive dependency angle which turns this into more of a plague than a blame assignment session.
Back a long time ago, companies were extremely wary of including any open source library (let alone thousands!) into their product. It took a very long time with audits, lawyers, etc to get a single library approved.
Yes, it was kind of a pain.
So the world has swung into the other extreme these days. Just pull in a couple thousand libraries from the internet, nobody knows what they even are or what's in them. All in the name of speed. So it has its benefits.
But the fundamental concerns of long ago are still there. Bringing in unreviewed third party code is a vector for vulnerabilities, supply chain attacks and all that joy.
Traditionally if something is too large to audit then you shouldn’t use it, which few exceptions (like Linux). Maybe this should be a red flag in the future, especially for a logging library that can almost be replaced with a call to stdout and a log collector.
The point is to keep you secure, not be a slow news relay. In that regard, GP is just really bad at his job.