Gary, Thank you. Your concern for warnings to users who download these older versions is well-taken. I agree: Something should be done about that on the archive-download web pages.
However, it must not be assumed that archival downloads of any OpenOffice.org releases preceding Apache OpenOffice 3.4 have been updated in place. Apache does not do that and other projects, including OpenOffice.org, have not done that. Previous releases are not replaced in archives when there are security issues, they are simply superseded by later releases (or, rarely, by a separate patch). In general, releases are not updated in place and patches are extremely rare. Users must install the later, corrected release to have the mitigation for any security vulnerabilities discovered in an older release. If a patched release for 3.3.0 had occurred, it would have a new number, such as 3.3.1. The Apache OpenOffice project has not produced new releases for any OpenOffice.org releases provided by Oracle and Sun that might still be made available via the openoffice.org site. I'm certain that you know that. The only Apache OpenOffice distributions are the provision of the source code of the patch and the provision of two separately-installable patches that apply to OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 and 3.4-dev/beta on Windows and Mac. These are supplemental to the available downloads. When Apache OpenOffice 3.4 is released, it will also provide mitigation of security issues that have been developed since OpenOffice.org 3.3.0. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: NoOp [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, April 23, 2012 11:59 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: CVE-2012-0037: OpenOffice.org data leakage vulnerability [ ... ] AOO continue to distribute 3.3.0, (3.2.1, 3.2.0 for some languages): http://www.openoffice.org/download/other.html So we must assume that *all* of those versions on that page have been patched... otherwise AOO continue to provide packages with a 'important' security vulnerability. Based on that 'assumption', I'll download & reinstall 3.3.0 from that page & reinstall over my existing OOo 3.3.0 (deb, rmp, and Windows) versions. I'll then have a fully patched 3.3.0 version... right? If that is not the case, then I suggest that AOO either pull those versions that have not been patched, or at the very least provide a strong warning that the code has an 'important' security vulnerability, on the download pages: http://www.openoffice.org/download/index.html http://www.openoffice.org/download/other.html and any other place where the program can be downloaded from directly (i.e., SF). A "responsible" distributor of such code might take a hint from: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html "Java SE 6 Update 31 This release includes security fixes. Learn more" and only provide unpatched code in a different location, with a warning: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/archive-139210.html "WARNING: These older versions of the JRE and JDK are provided to help developers debug issues in older systems. They are not updated with the latest security patches and are not recommended for use in production." - Gary --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
