North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Reasons why BIND isn't being upgraded

  • From: Patrick Greenwell
  • Date: Fri Feb 02 18:46:30 2001 
On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, Joe Rhett wrote:

> > Without rehashing the whole "open-disclosure" vs. "non-disclosure" 
> > arguments related to security issues in software, or the historically
> > extreme inadequacies of CERT in offering timely notification of ANY 
> > security-related issues, it's very disappointing to see ISC resort to a
> > fee-based, non-public-disclosure-at-the-time-of-discovery, NDA'd and
> > "we'll update people via CERT" method of dealing with the community they
> > have served for so long.
> > 
> > I would have hoped by now that lists such as Bugtraq would have adequately 
> > exhibited the folly of such methodologies. 
>  
> The purpose of the list doesn't appear to circumvent Bugtraq -- you're
> comparing two different issues.

I suggest you re-read the pre-announcement, and also factor in other
statements made by Paul that the community will now be notified via CERT
when security problems occur. CERT has historically been worthless in this
regard(IMO). By the time they release warnings, the problems have been
well known among the security and dark-hat communities for weeks, months
or in extreme cases years. In all fairness I believe this has been
due to the vendors being unwilling to release the information, rather than
due to any fault of CERT staff. 

In any case the result is the same: information is late in coming to
anyone that relies on CERT for that information, exposing those
individuals/organizations to a greater level of vunerability and risk than
they would otherwise face. It's foolish to rely on CERT notifications as
the most timely information one could acquire.
 
Finally, I'm not sure what you'd call NDAs that would prevent disclosure
of security problems, but I'd say that's about as opposite of Bugtraq as
you can get.  

P.S. AboveNet is taking the latest BIND vunerability(ies) seriously enough
that they are beginning wholescale scans of their address space. Draw your
own conclusions related to masking version numbers.