NIST gives up enriching most CVEs
168 points - yesterday at 3:09 PM
SourceComments
It is true but the reverse is also true. It may be very hard for an external body to issue proper scoring and narrative for bugs in thousands of various software packages. Some bugs are easy, like if you get instant root on a Unix system by typing "please give me root", then it's probably a high severity issue. But a lot of bugs are not simple and require a lot of deep product knowledge and understanding of the system to properly grade. The knowledge that is frequently not widely available outside of the organization. And, for example, assigning panic scores to issues that are very niche and theoretical, and do not affect most users at all, may also be counter-productive and lead to massive waste of time and resources.
Long story short, the reports were things like “If your program gets this weird packet, it takes a little longer than usual to free resources”. There was one supposed “packet of death” report which I took seriously enough to spend an afternoon writing a test case for; I couldn’t reproduce the bug and the tester realized their test setup was broken.
There seems to be a lot of pressure for people to get status by claiming they broke some old open source project, to the point people like me are getting pulled out of retirement to look at issues which are trivial.
"Enrichment" apparently is their term for adding detailed information about bugs to the CVE database.
CVSS (risk) is already well handled by other sources, but CPE (what software is affected) is kind of critical. I don't even know how they're going to focus enrichment on software the government uses without knowing what software the CVEs are in.
Maybe not in english or smth
Majority of researchers dont care how important the bug is, everyone wants something to put on CV, they get paid extra by companies to finding bugs in SAP or SalesForce that will never ever ever be used for anything.
Pointless moot just to generate noice. Like 90% of whole infosec sector.
At least thats what I understood from discussions with someone who has many nations security at stake at work.
Now - I am not saying I disagree with everything here, mind you; I guess everyone may agree that CVEs may range in severity. But then the question also is ... what is the point of an organisation that is cut down to, say, handle 1% of CVEs - and ignore the rest? Why have such an organisation then to begin with?
I don't have enough data to conclude anything, but from a superficial glance it kind of seems like trying to cut down on standards or efficiency.