Hey, all. The topic of whether and which security issues should block releases has come up several times before. While we haven't actually had many really serious security issues to worry about since the introduction of the current release criteria system, I think it's certainly something we should take into account. At the same time, it's fairly established in practice that we don't just consider anything worth issuing a CVE for as a release-blocking bug. So, to capture what I believe would be the intent of the project, I propose this as an Alpha release criterion for F16 onwards. (For those on devel and security lists who may not be completely familiar with the release criteria / blocker system, this would mean that any bug for an issue which breached the criterion should be considered a release blocker for any Alpha, Beta or Final release).
# There must be no known remote code execution vulnerability which could be exploited during installation or during use of a live image shipped with the release Points to consider: * Possible variants to the type of vulnerability covered...do we also want to make local privesc vulns blocking? Conversely, do we want to make only remote *root* execution vulns blocking? I don't know if anyone would want to go as far as making DoS vulns release blocking, but speak up if you would! (Of course there is again the local/remote distinction to consider there: 'all DoS vulns' would be a much tighter standard than 'remote DoS vulns'). * The caveat about where the issue is exploitable is important because if you can't exploit it from the installer or a live image, it becomes less relevant whether we ship with it or not, because you would be safe with the first post-install update assuming we submitted an update for the issue promptly. But it may be the case that we want to broaden it out to also cover issues that can be exploited from a default DVD install, if we consider the window between install and first update (if updates repos aren't used during installation) to be unacceptable. * We have a system whereby the criteria get more onerous from Alpha to Beta to Final, so it could be the case that we accept worse security issues in Alpha than in Beta and so on; we could have a loose criterion for Alpha and a tighter one for Beta. In this case it felt sensible to me to just go with one criterion, but please say if you disagree. * The aim of the release criteria is more to codify existing practice than to extend it; we have taken security issues as release blockers before and considered but rejected less serious ones, but we have done so on an ad hoc basis. I tried to write the criterion to reflect our past practice on this. So precedents are important here; if you have any that contradict the proposed criterion, please do cite them. Feedback please! Thanks :) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
