On 10/26/17 11:46, Pramod Immaneni wrote:
On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 10:39 AM, Vlad Rozov <vro...@apache.org> wrote:

I guess you are mostly concerned regarding new CVE in an existing
dependency. Once such CVE is added to a database, will it be better to know
about it or postpone discovery till we cut release candidate? In case it is
reported only during release cycle, there is much less time for the
community to take an action and it still needs to be taken (as a PMC member
you are responsible for preventing release with severe security issue going
out). If it is reported once the information becomes available, there is
more time to research and either upgrade the dependency with newly found
CVE, agree that it does not impact the project.

This would be the more commonly occurring scenario. We can always know
about the CVEs because of your changes. We don't need to fail builds to do
that. I am not asking you to remove the reporting. There is no set time for
a release so having less time during release for addressing relevant CVEs
does not come up. There is also nothing preventing anyone from looking at
these reports and taking action earlier.
I don't see why it will be more commonly occurring scenario, but I think it is equally important to prevent new dependency with severe vulnerabilities being introduced into the project and check existing dependencies for newly discovered severe vulnerabilities.

How will we know about CVE if it is removed from CI build? Why require manual verification when it can be done during CI build and does not affect builds done by individual contributors?

While there is no set time for a release, there is no set time for a PR merge as well.

Yes, nothing prevents anyone from looking at the dependency vulnerabilities, but there is a better chance that "anyone" does not mean nobody if CI build fails.


I still do not understand why you value an individual contributor and PR
over the community and the project itself. Once there is a severe security
vulnerability, it affects everyone who cares about the project, including
all contributors. I don't see a problem with a PR being in a pending (not
merged) open state till a build issue is resolved.

That is a mischaracterization that you have stated before as well. A
project cannot grow without contributions and without policies that create
a supportive enviroment where that can happen, I don't see the need to put
unnecessary obstacles for legitimate contributions that are not the cause
of a problem. Everytime there is a matching CVE the PRs are going to get
blocked till that CVE is addressed and I am not confident we have the
bandwidth in the community to address this expediently. It is also
inaccurate to equate this to PR not being merged till build issues are
resolved as it derives from an assumption that CVE is same as a build
failure.
While project can't grow without individual contributions, project is a result of a large number of contributions from a number of contributors. Some of those contributors are not active anymore and will not provide any fixes should a vulnerability be found in their contribution. It becomes a shared responsibility of all currently active community members and those who submit PR are part of the community and share that responsibility, are not they? If a contributor considers him/herself as part of a community, why he or she can't wait for the build issue to be resolved or better take an action on resolving the issue? The only possible explanation that I see is the one that I already mentioned on this thread.

If you see this as unnecessary obstacles for legitimate contributions, why to enforce code style, it is also unnecessary obstacle. Unit test? Should it be considered to be optional for a PR to pass unit tests as well? What if an environment change on CI side causes build to fail similar to what happened recently? Should we disable CI builds too and rely on a committer or a release manager to run unit tests?  If CI build fails for whatever reason, how can you be sure that if it fails for another PR as well, that they both fail for the same reason and there is no any other reasons that will cause a problem with a PR?



Thank you,

Vlad


On 10/26/17 09:42, Pramod Immaneni wrote:

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 12:08 AM, Vlad Rozov <vro...@apache.org> wrote:

There is a way to add an exception, but it needs to be discussed on a case
by case basis. Note that CVEs are not published until a fix is available.
For severity 8 CVEs I expect patches to become available for the reported
version unless it is an obsolete version in which case, the upgrade to a
supported version is already overdue.

I think we should retain the ability to make that choice of what and when
to upgrade rather than hard enforce it. Like I mentioned the CVE may not
apply to us (it has happened before), even though it may be beneficial
upgrade generally when its not applicable, there may not be the bandwidth
in community to do the necessary changes to upgrade to a newer version
especially if those dependencies don't follow semver (has happened before
as well, remember effort with ning). My caution comes from experiencing
this situation before.


I don't see how reporting helps. If a build succeeds, I don't expect
anyone to look into the report, it is only when CI build fails,
committers
and reviewers look into the details.

We can add a mandatory step during release that we need to assess CVEs
matching this criteria before proceeding with the release. This could end
up requiring upgrade of some dependencies and in other cases it may not be
needed. This assessment can also happen more often in adhoc fashion
offline
before release based upon interest from community. I am also open to
making
it mandatory with every PR, in future, like you are suggesting, if we see
sufficient uptake in community on these issues. From experience this is
not
there currently and hence I don't want to do this now.


IMO, it does not matter how CVE is introduced. It may be a new dependency
with an existing CVE or it can be a new CVE for an existing dependency.
In
both cases, dependency with the CVE needs to be fixed.

In one case the PR is not directly responsible for the issue and hence we
should avoid penalizing them or block them.



Thank you,

Vlad

On 10/25/17 11:58, Pramod Immaneni wrote:

Thanks that sounds mostly fine except what happens if there is a cve
matching that severity in a dependency but it doesnt affect us because
let's say we don't exercise that part of functionality *and* there
isn't a
fix available or there is a fix but the upgrade requires significant
effort
(for example if we need to move to a new major version of the dependency
or
something like that). Is there a way to add an exception like we did for
checkstyle in the interim. How about reporting instead of failing the
builds. One of the steps in release process could be to investigate
these
reports before proceeding with the release. If a PR introduces new cves
by
virtue of adding a new dependency or changing an existing version, that
would be of interest and can be subject to failure. Is there a way to
distinguish that?

On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 8:52 AM Vlad Rozov <vro...@apache.org> wrote:

A CVE (should there be a vulnerability in existing or a newly introduced

dependency) will not be exposed during the CI build, but the build will
fail if the CVE has severity 8 or above. To get the details, it will be
necessary to run dependency check manually.

Thank you,

Vlad

On 10/24/17 16:27, Pramod Immaneni wrote:

There was a lot of discussion on this but looks like there was no final
agreement. Can you summarize what your PR does? Are we disclosing the
actual vulnerabilities as part of the automated build for every PR?
That
would be a no-no for me. If it is something that requires manual
steps,

for
example as part of a release build, that would be fine.
On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 1:16 PM, Vlad Rozov <vro...@apache.org>
wrote:

Please see https://github.com/apache/apex-core/pull/585 and
APEXCORE-790.
Thank you,

Vlad


On 9/14/17 09:35, Vlad Rozov wrote:

Do you expect anything else from the community to recognize a

contribution other than committing it to the code line? Once there
is
a
steady flow of quality contributions, the community/PMC will
recognize

a
contributor by making that contributor a committer.

Thank you,
Vlad

On 9/12/17 13:05, Sanjay Pujare wrote:

For a vendor too, quality ought to be as important as security so I
don't

think we disagree on the cost benefit analysis. But I get your drift.
By "creative incentive" I didn't imply any material incentive
(although a
gift card would be nice :-)) but more along the lines of what a
community
can do to recognize such contribution.
Sanjay
On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 8:10 AM, Vlad Rozov <vro...@apache.org>

wrote:
I guess we have a different view on the benefit and cost definition.
For
me the benefit of fixing CI build, flaky unit test, severe security
issue
is huge for the community and is possibly small (except for a

security
issues) for a vendor.
By "creative" I hope you don't mean that other community members,
users
and customers send a contributor a gift cards to compensate for the
cost
:). For me PR that is blocked on a failed CI build is sufficiently
incentive for a contributor to look into why it fails and fixing it.
Thank you,

Vlad

On 9/11/17 23:58, Sanjay Pujare wrote:

I don't want to speak for others and I don't want to generalize.
But

an
obvious answer could be "cost-benefit analysis".
In any case we should come up with a creative way to "incentivize"
members
to do these tasks.





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