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Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by mholt on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @03:51PM (#39375157)
I haven't read the content of the patches to understand the impact of the bugs, but from my own experience [0] I can suggest a few reasons:

- CVEs are gold to researchers and organizations like citations are to academics. In this case, the CVEs were filed based on "policy" but it's unclear if they are just adding noise to the DB.

- The severity of the bug is not as severe as greater powers-that-be would like to think (again, they see it as doing due diligence; developers who know the ins and outs might see it as an overreaction).

- Bug is in an experimental feature.

I'm not saying one way is right or not in this case, just pointing out my experience has generally been that CVEs are kind of broken in general...

[0]: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/4775

Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by TedDoesntTalk on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @05:07PM (#39376246)
To summarize: the more CVEs a "security researcher" can say he created on his resume, the more impressive he thinks he looks. Therefore, the incentive to file CVEs for any stupid little problem is very high. This creates a lot of noise for developers who are forced to address sometimes nonsense that are filed as "high" or "critical".
Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by Sohcahtoa82 on Friday February 16, 2024 @05:11PM (#39403633)
So true...

If you run a web app of any sort, and you don't have "X-Frame-Options: Deny" in your headers, you'll get lots of "researchers" (that are probably bots) e-mailing you that you have a CRITICAL security issue.

"Beg bounties", we call them.

Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by arp242 on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @07:57PM (#39377795)
"Denial of service" is never a security bug; it's a huge mistake people have started classifying these things as such to start with. Serious bug? Sure. Loss of security? Not really.
Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by mholt on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @08:03PM (#39377834)
Eh, it's widely considered that part of security is availability.

But I agree DoS is kind of a strawman since everything connected to a network is vulnerable to some form of DoS without extensive mitigation.

Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by dspillett on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @09:46PM (#39378525)
> "Denial of service" is never a security bug

That very much depends on what service is being denied. Nginx is _everywhere_. While not a direct security concern for nginx (instead an availablity issue) it could have security or safety implications for wider systems. What if knocking out nginx breaks a service for logging & monitoring security information? Or an ambulance call out management system? Or a payment progressing system for your business at the busiest time if your trading year? There are many other such examples. This sort of thing is why availablity can be considered a security matter and therefore why DoS vulnerabilities, particularly those affecting common software, are handled as security issues of significant severity.

Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by arp242 on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @11:55PM (#39379255)
Almost every bug can be considered a security bug under the wrong set of circumstances.

With fairly cheap ddos services you can "just" order you can knock most servers offline anyway. Internet reachability is rarely safety-critical, and if it is, that's probably a huge design flaw somewhere because there's tons of reasons outside of your control that can make the internet not work for either the server or clients.

Is all of this inconvenient and (potentially) a serious problem? Sure. But not "zomg criminals have credit card records / can spoof random domains / read private data / etc. etc." type serious.

Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by dspillett on Thursday February 15, 2024 @06:02AM (#39381286)
> Almost every bug can be considered a security bug [...] With fairly cheap ddos services...

A DoS bug and an DDoS attack are very different things. One is a flaw that can bring a service down, the other is a brute force technique for making a service unusable. You can DDoS services without exploiting bugs.

Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by arp242 on Thursday February 15, 2024 @09:53AM (#39383343)
I am aware; my point is that "denying the service" is pretty easy even without the presence of any bugs in the service. Stealing credit cards on the other hand...
Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by manquer on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @11:40PM (#39379176)
We could argue that about almost anything though . There are always secondary effects possible and sometimes even likely. I can only think of the proverb/poem - "For want of a nail".
Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by GoblinSlayer on Friday February 16, 2024 @06:50AM (#39395722)
In those cases you just know that any problem can cause you trouble, so you pay attention to all problems including low severity ones like DoS, performance slowdowns or lack of bells and whistles.
Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by e12e on Thursday February 15, 2024 @09:18AM (#39382977)
> "Denial of service" is never a security bug.

What about serving certificate revocation list, with another system relying on say one day old cache? (Sure, that's "fail open" - but still...).

Or proxying LDAP for sync to a central auth/authz system?

Ed: proxy giving access to logging system goes down - alert on failed logins silenced, disabling rate limits for brute force attacks?

Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by arp242 on Thursday February 15, 2024 @10:35AM (#39383932)
Almost any bug in those kind of systems are potential security bugs. Not having the service available at all is probably among the least critical type of bug that can happen.
Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by GoblinSlayer on Friday February 16, 2024 @07:42AM (#39396177)
AFAIK, mandatory OCSP is turned off by default. Exactly because it fails regularly. Try to turn it on and see how it goes.
Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by account42 on Monday February 19, 2024 @09:14AM (#39429939)
For how long does it fail? Because I have not seen any availability issues with OCSP stapling (including must staple in the cert) using Let's Encrypt.
Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by probably_satan on Thursday February 15, 2024 @08:56PM (#39392149)
You are clueless
Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by AlexeyBelov on Friday February 16, 2024 @02:58AM (#39394385)
Please provide a counter-argument, a suspiciously fresh trollish account. Shallow dismissals are against the guidelines.
Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by Communitivity on Friday February 16, 2024 @12:04PM (#39399761)
Many security specialists via security as described by the CISSP material (Certified Information Systems Security Professional). Loosely speaking, that means ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the system (including data received, data stored, and data sent).

Viewed in this light a bug that enables a successful Denial of Service (DoS) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a security bug. A bug that causes a DoS or DDoS, but is not exploitable, would not be a security bug (e.g., some idiot added an infinite loop to the startup code). That's where issue triage comes in, a bug should never be assigned before its triaged. Sometimes triage results in 'we don't know enough' and someone gets assigned to evaluate the bug to answer specific questions before triage can finished. After triage is get assigned - or even better, a developer with a matching skill set chooses it to work on for the next release/sprint/etc.

Re:Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork by otbutz on Thursday February 15, 2024 @04:18AM (#39380621)
The issue you linked to is an excellent example of why everyone and their dog is becoming a CNA these days. It's the only way to keep CVE spam at bay. The system has been broken by the gamification of CVEs and is in desperate need of reform.