North American Network Operators Group
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Re: SendGate: Sendmail Multiple Vulnerabilities (Race Condition DoS,

  • From: Alain Hebert
  • Date: Fri Mar 24 23:09:15 2006

Hi,

My only big issue with all of this is that a lot of us are depending on sendmail and its developer to keep it bug free...

But who are we to ask them to be accountable to us?

What are we paying them for it?

What make us so special that to command them, or whinne about it when its not as perfect as ones mind think things should be?

We should praise them and accept whatever scrap they send us.

Because at the end of the day, sendmail, its staff, and other contributor saves our butts.

(time to go put on my fireproof jammies)

Gadi Evron wrote:

[email protected] wrote:


I wonder how many other unreported silently-patched
vulnerabilities are out there?


You seem to be inferring that it is a bad thing to silently
patch bugs which may have security implications. The OpenBSD

Full disclosure, we believe in it.


team makes a habit of auditing software for flaws and fixing
them without waiting to find out whether they create actual
security vulnerabilities. They consider this to be a GOOD thing.

It is a good thing.
I think that people who use software also consider it to
be good for software flaws to be fixed as quickly as possible.
Inevitably, this means that if the DEVELOPERS discover a flaw, they will fix it before they tell anyone about it. The
reason that security researchers publish bulletins about
security flaws is because they are unable to fix them either due to lack of skill, or more commonly, they just don't have permission to commit changes to the source code.

Network operators are users of software and not developers,
therefore most network operators are happy when flaws are
fixed early and often.

I wonder if the same network operators will be happy about potentially millions of compromised sendmail servers globally.

--
Alain Hebert [email protected] PubNIX Inc. P.O. Box 175 Beaconsfield, Quebec H9W 5T7
tel 514-990-5911 http://www.pubnix.net fax 514-990-9443