Contents of /doc/narrative_introduction

        A Narrative Introduction to the Testing Security Tracker 


About
-----

Everything that Testing Security does is publicly available, as in
"Debian doesn't hide problems" available. 

The best thing about our tracking 'system' is that it is very basic.
There is no horrible overhead of web-based ticket/issue trackers, its
just a subversion repository and some text files that we
collaboratively edit and then some scripts to parse these files and
generate useful reports available online. Everything is designed to be
very simple to use, transparent and easy to see what other people are
working on so you can work on other things.

Why are these issues disclosed to the public?

The way we look at it is that 99% of all vulnerabilities are already
public, and 1% are vendor-sec/embargoed issues.

Stable security deals with embargoed/vendor-sec issues, we don't, we
deal with issues that have already been assigned CVE numbers (although
we often times request these assignments), have been posted to common
security mailing lists, or are seen in commit logs of software that is
tracked (such as the Linux Kernel).

It is our philosophy that if the Internet knows that there is a
vulnerability in something, then we better know about it and the
package maintainer needs to know about it and it needs to be fixed as
soon as possible. It doesn't make sense to hide issues that everyone
knows about already, in fact users have told us that they prefer to
know not only when a package they have installed is vulnerable (so
they can disable it or firewall it off, or patch it or whatever), but
to also know that Debian is working on a fix. Transparency is what our
users expect, and what they deserve. Tracking publicly known issues
openly (and the occasional unfortunate embargoed issue privately) is
good for the project as a whole, especially the public's perception of
the project.

Gentle Introduction
--------------------

This following will give you a basic walk-through of how the files are
structured and how we do our work tracking issues. There is much more
that can be documented, but it is difficult to get all the issues
notated and updated. It is easier to get a basic idea and then
extrapolate from there how to do the rest. Ok, thats a bad excuse, so
the full information should be filled in.

The best way to understand is to check out our repository from
subversion so you have the files on your computer and can follow along
at home. To do this, you need an Alioth account, and then you just
need to do the following:

svn co svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/secure-testing

This will check out our working repository into a directory called
secure-testing. Inside this directory are a number of subdirectories.
The data directory is where we do most of our work. 

If you don't need write access, you can of course check out our files
without an Alioth account as well:

svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/secure-testing

Automatic Issue Updates
-----------------------
Twice a day a cronjob runs that pulls down the latest full CVE lists
from Mitre, this automatically gets checked into data/CVE/list. We get
notified via either email
(http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/secure-testing-commits)
of every SVN commit, by RSS feed
(http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/secure-testing/?op=rss&rev=0&sc=0&isdir=1)
or via the CIA bot on #debian-security on OFTC. For example, the bot
will say in the channel:

17:14 < CIA-1> joeyh * r2314 /data/CVE/list: automatic CAN database update

Most of our work is taking the new issues that Mitre releases and
processing them so that the tracking data is correct. Read on for how we
do this.

Processing TODO entries
-----------------------
The Mitre update typically manifests in new CVE entries. So what we do
is to update our svn repository and then edit data/CVE/list and look
for new TODO entries. These will often be in blocks of 10-50 or so,
depending on how many new issues they have assigned. Depending on how
you feel you will "claim" a block of say 10 new entries by
putting your name in the file at the beginning and the end of the new
TODO entries and then commit the repository. This looks like this:

begin claimed by jmm
CVE-2005-4066 (Total Commander 6.53 uses weak encryption to store FTP
usernams and ...)
        TODO: check
CVE-2005-4065 (SQL injection vulnerability in the search module in
Edgewall Trac ...)
        TODO: check
CVE-2005-4030 (SQL injection vulnerability in Quicksilver Forums
before 1.5.1 allows ...)
        TODO: check
end claimed by jmm

Once these are checked-in, then others will not do work on these TODO
issues. 

Issues Not-For-Us (NFU)
-----------------------
Processing your claimed entries is done by first seeing if the issue
is related to any software packaged in Debian, if it isn't a package
in Debian and has no ITP then you note that in the file, for example:

CVE-2005-3018 (Apple Safari allows remote attackers to cause a denial of
service ...)
   NOT-FOR-US: Safari

Reserved entries
----------------
Several security problems have coordinated dates of public disclosure,
i.e. a CVE identifier has been assigned to a problem, but it's not
public yet. Also, several vendors have a pool of CVE ids they can
assign to problems that are detected in their products. Such entries
are marked as RESERVED in the tracker:

CVE-2005-1432
        RESERVED

Rejected entries
----------------
Sometimes there are CVE assignments that later turn out to be duplicates,
mistakes or non-issues. These items are reverted and turned into REJECTED
entries:

CVE-2005-4129
        REJECTED

ITP packages
------------
If it is a package that someone has filed an RFP or ITP for, then that
is also noted, so it can be tracked to make sure that the issue is
resolved before the package enters the archive:

CVE-2004-2525 (Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in compat.php
in Serendipity ...)
        - serendipity <itp> (bug #312413)


Packages in the archive
-----------------------
If it is a package in Debian, look to see if the package is affected or 
not (sometimes newer versions that have the fixes have already been 
uploaded). 

If the version has been fixed already, note the package name and the
Debian version that fixes it and assign a severity level to it, for
example:

CVE-2005-2596 (User.php in Gallery, as used in Postnuke, allows users
with any Admin ...)
   - gallery 1.5-2 (medium)

If it hasn't been fixed, we determine if there has been a bug filed
about the issue, and if not, file one and then note it in the list
(again with a severity level):

CVE-2005-3054 (fopen_wrappers.c in PHP 4.4.0, and possibly other
versions, does not ...)
   - php4 <unfixed> (bug #353585; medium)
   - php5 <unfixed> (bug #353585; medium)

Bug numbers can be added as in the example above. To avoid duplicate bugs,
"bug filed" can be added instead of "bug #123456" when the bug report has
been sent but the bug number is not yet known.  The bug numbers are used
to add additional references for the overview page and the Security Bug
Tracker and they are parsed by a script that generates user tags "tracked"
for the user debian-security@lists.debian.org. This way you can generate
a BTS query for all issues in the BTS that are tagged "security" and are
not yet added to our tracker:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=security;users=debian-security@lists.debian.org;exclude=tracked

A special exception is made for kernel related issues. The kernel-sec group will take
care of them and file bugs if needed.

If a vulnerability does not affect Debian, e.g. because the vulnerable
code is not contained, it is marked as <not-affected>:

CVE-2004-2628 (Multiple directory traversal vulnerabilities in thttpd 2.07 beta 0.4, ...)
        - thttpd <not-affected> (Windows-specific vulnerabilities)

<not-affected> is also used if a vulnerability was fixed before a
package was uploaded into the Debian archive.

Sometimes there are cases, where a vulnerability hasn't been fixed with
a code change, but simply by deciding that a package is that broken that
it needs to be removed from the archive entirely. This is tracked with
the <removed> tag:

CVE-2005-1435 (Open WebMail (OWM) before 2.51 20050430 allows remote authenticated ...)
        - openwebmail <removed>

After a new Debian release, some packages vanish from the database,
and consistency checks might fail.  In this case, a single <removed>
entry needs to be added to an input file, or the package name should
be included in the data/packages/removed-packages file.

Severity levels
---------------
These levels are mostly used to prioritize the order in which security
problems are resolved. Anyway, we have a rough overview on how you should
assess these levels. 

unimportant: This problem does not affect the Debian binary package, e.g.
             a vulnerable source file, which is not built, a vulnerable file
             in doc/foo/examples/, PHP Safe mode bugs, path disclosure (doesn't
             matter on Debian).
             All "non-issues in practice" fall also into this category, like
             issues only "exploitable" if the code in question is setuid root,
             exploits which only work if someone already has administrative
             privileges or similar.

low        : A security problem, which has only mild security implications
             and one would even be comfortable with if it continues to
             be present (local DoS, /tmp file races and so on).

medium     : For anything which permits code execution after user interaction.
             Local privilege escalation vulnerabilities are in this category as
             well, or remote privilege escalation if it's constrained to the
             application (i.e. no shell access to the underlying system, such
             as simple cross-site scripting). Most remote DoS vulnerabilities
             fall into this category, too.

high       : A typical, exploitable security problem, which you'll really
             like to fix or at least implement a workaround. This could
             be because the vulnerable code is very broadly used, because
             an exploit is in the wild or because the attack vector is
             very wide. 
             Should be put into that category anything that permits an attacker
             to execute arbitrary code on the vulnerable system (with or
             without root privileges) and high-impact denial-of-service bugs
             (for instance, an IPv4 forwarding path vulnerability which
             requires only very few packets to exploit).
             Significant defects in security software can be rated "high" as
             well (for instance, a vulnerability in a piece of cryptographic
             software which flags forged digital signatures as genuine).


Certain packages may get higher or lower rating than usual, based on
their importance.


NOTE and TODO entries
---------------------
There are many instances where more work has to be done to determine
if something is affected, and you might not be able to do this at the
time. These entries can have their TODO line changed to something
descriptive so that it is clear what remains to be done. For example:

CVE-2005-3990 (Directory traversal vulnerability in FastJar 0.93
allows remote ...)
        TODO: check, whether fastjar from the gcc source packages is affected

It is also useful to add information to issues as you find it, so that
when others go to look at an issue and want to know why you marked it
as you did, or need a reference, it will be there. The more
information left, the better. For example, the following entry lets
you know that CVE-2005-3258 doesn't affect the squid that we have
because the issue was introduced in a patch that was never applied to
the Debian package:

CVE-2005-3258 (The rfc1738_do_escape function in ftp.c for Squid 2.5
STABLE11 and ...)
        - squid <not-affected> (bug #334882; medium)
        NOTE: Bug was introduced in a patch to squid-2.5.STABLE10,
        NOTE: this patch was never applied to the Debian package.

Distribution tags
-----------------
Our data is primarily targeted at sid, as we track the version that
a certain issue was fixed in sid. The Security Tracker web site (see
below) derives information about the applicability of a vulnerability
to stable and oldstable from the list of DSAs issued by the security
team and the fact that a source package is part of a release.
Distribution tags can be used to denote information about a vulnerability
for the version of a package in a specific release. An example:

CVE-2005-3974 (Drupal 4.5.0 through 4.5.5 and 4.6.0 through 4.6.3, when running on ...)
        - drupal 4.5.6-1 (low)
        [sarge] - drupal <not-affected> (Only vulnerable if running PHP 5)

Drupal has been fixed since 4.5.6, however Drupal from Sarge still isn't
vulnerable as the vulnerability is only effective when run under PHP 5,
which isn't part of Sarge.

Generated Reports
-----------------
All of this tracking information gets automatically parsed and
compared against madison to determine what has been fixed and what is
still waiting, this results in this website:

http://security-tracker.debian.net/

It incorporates package lists and parses distribution lists and can
thus be used to
- Present the security history of a package
- Provide overviews of vulnerable packages in stable, testing, sid and
  oldstable (it still has some false positives, wrt packages in
  stable that are present in stable, but not vulnerable, but these
  will be ironed out soon). The oldstable data is likely inaccurate.
- Generate a list of packages that are subject to security problems, but
  stuck in testing migration due to problems with the dependency chain
  and thus candidates for a DTSA
- Generate a list of TODO issues that need to be addressed
- Generate a list of packages that will enter Debian soon and need to
  be checked for security problems
- Generate a list of provisional IDs that need to be turned into proper
  CVE entries
- Show some potential problems in the data pool (e.g. misspelled package
  names not found in the packages list, or potentially missing epochs)

For every security problem it displays
- The CVE information
- A severity assessment by NVD
- Cross references to DTSAs, DSAs and bugs in the BTS
- The status of a security problem in stable, oldstable, testing and sid
- Additional notes from our tracker

The DSA list
------------
We maintain a list of all DSA advisories issued by the stable security
team. This information is used to derive information about the state
of security problems for the stable and oldstable distribution. An
entry for a DSA looks like this:

[21 Nov 2005] DSA-903-1 unzip - race condition
        {CVE-2005-2475}
        [woody] - unzip 5.50-1woody4
        [sarge] - unzip 5.52-1sarge2
        NOTE: fixed in testing at time of DSA

The first line tracks the date, when a DSA was issued, the DSA
identifier, the affected source package and the type of vulnerability.
The second line performs a cross-reference to the entry in CVE/list
that maintains the state of the vulnerability in sid. Every entry that
is added like this to DSA/list is parsed by a script and automatically
added to CVE/list.  The next lines contain the fixes for stable and
optionally oldstable, addressed with distribution tags.  You may add
NOTE: entries freely, we use a NOTE entry for statistical purposes
that tracks, when a fix has reached testing relative to the time when
it hit stable.

There is no need to add anything to CVE/list for a DSA, the DSA
cross-reference will be added automatically by the cron job. However,
you do need to add [sarge] or [woody] entries to CVE/list when there
is a 'no-dsa' or 'not-affected' condition.

The bin/dsa2list script can be used to generate a template for a new
DSA entry once the official DSA is published on the web.  You should
not blindly trust the script output and double-check it, though.

Checking your changes
---------------------
Commits are checked for syntax errors before they are actually committed,
and you'll receive an error and your commit is aborted if it is in error.
To check your changes yourself beforehand, use "make check-syntax" from
the root of the svn directory.

Following up on security issues
-------------------------------
By simply loading this page and doing a little gardening of the
different issues many things can be done. One thing is that you can
read all the bug reports of each issue and see if new information has
been added to the end that might provide updated or changed
information (such as if an issue has been closed, or a version of the
package has been uploaded that contains the fix). It is also useful to
follow-up on the issues to prod the maintainer to deal with the issue,
which they may have forgotten about.


IRC Channel
-----------
We hang-out on #debian-security on OFTC, stop by the IRC channel if
you'd like, also we can add you to the alioth project so you have svn
write permission and you can test drive it on the testing issues for
however long you like to get an idea or feel comfortable (and hey it
helps!)


TODO:
document DTSAs
document tsck
document CVE-XXXX
document tracked tag
1	micah	2985	A Narrative Introduction to the Testing Security Tracker
2
3
4			About
5			-----
6
7	nion	6527	Everything that Testing Security does is publicly available, as in
8	micah	2985	"Debian doesn't hide problems" available.
9
10			The best thing about our tracking 'system' is that it is very basic.
11			There is no horrible overhead of web-based ticket/issue trackers, its
12			just a subversion repository and some text files that we
13			collaboratively edit and then some scripts to parse these files and
14			generate useful reports available online. Everything is designed to be
15	tedp-guest	6022	very simple to use, transparent and easy to see what other people are
16	micah	2985	working on so you can work on other things.
17
18			Why are these issues disclosed to the public?
19
20			The way we look at it is that 99% of all vulnerabilities are already
21			public, and 1% are vendor-sec/embargoed issues.
22
23			Stable security deals with embargoed/vendor-sec issues, we don't, we
24			deal with issues that have already been assigned CVE numbers (although
25			we often times request these assignments), have been posted to common
26			security mailing lists, or are seen in commit logs of software that is
27			tracked (such as the Linux Kernel).
28
29			It is our philosophy that if the Internet knows that there is a
30			vulnerability in something, then we better know about it and the
31			package maintainer needs to know about it and it needs to be fixed as
32			soon as possible. It doesn't make sense to hide issues that everyone
33			knows about already, in fact users have told us that they prefer to
34			know not only when a package they have installed is vulnerable (so
35			they can disable it or firewall it off, or patch it or whatever), but
36	tedp-guest	6022	to also know that Debian is working on a fix. Transparency is what our
37	nion	6527	users expect, and what they deserve. Tracking publicly known issues
38	micah	2985	openly (and the occasional unfortunate embargoed issue privately) is
39			good for the project as a whole, especially the public's perception of
40			the project.
41
42	micah	3520	Gentle Introduction
43	micah	2985	--------------------
44
45			This following will give you a basic walk-through of how the files are
46			structured and how we do our work tracking issues. There is much more
47			that can be documented, but it is difficult to get all the issues
48			notated and updated. It is easier to get a basic idea and then
49			extrapolate from there how to do the rest. Ok, thats a bad excuse, so
50			the full information should be filled in.
51
52			The best way to understand is to check out our repository from
53			subversion so you have the files on your computer and can follow along
54			at home. To do this, you need an Alioth account, and then you just
55			need to do the following:
56
57			svn co svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/secure-testing
58
59			This will check out our working repository into a directory called
60			secure-testing. Inside this directory are a number of subdirectories.
61			The data directory is where we do most of our work.
62
63	jmm-guest	2991	If you don't need write access, you can of course check out our files
64			without an Alioth account as well:
65
66			svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/secure-testing
67
68	micah	2985	Automatic Issue Updates
69			-----------------------
70			Twice a day a cronjob runs that pulls down the latest full CVE lists
71			from Mitre, this automatically gets checked into data/CVE/list. We get
72			notified via either email
73			(http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/secure-testing-commits)
74			of every SVN commit, by RSS feed
75			(http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/secure-testing/?op=rss&rev=0&sc=0&isdir=1)
76			or via the CIA bot on #debian-security on OFTC. For example, the bot
77			will say in the channel:
78
79			17:14 < CIA-1> joeyh * r2314 /data/CVE/list: automatic CAN database update
80
81			Most of our work is taking the new issues that Mitre releases and
82			processing them so that the tracking data is correct. Read on for how we
83			do this.
84
85	neilm	5083	Processing TODO entries
86	micah	2985	-----------------------
87			The Mitre update typically manifests in new CVE entries. So what we do
88			is to update our svn repository and then edit data/CVE/list and look
89			for new TODO entries. These will often be in blocks of 10-50 or so,
90			depending on how many new issues they have assigned. Depending on how
91			you feel you will "claim" a block of say 10 new entries by
92			putting your name in the file at the beginning and the end of the new
93			TODO entries and then commit the repository. This looks like this:
94
95			begin claimed by jmm
96			CVE-2005-4066 (Total Commander 6.53 uses weak encryption to store FTP
97			usernams and ...)
98			TODO: check
99			CVE-2005-4065 (SQL injection vulnerability in the search module in
100			Edgewall Trac ...)
101			TODO: check
102			CVE-2005-4030 (SQL injection vulnerability in Quicksilver Forums
103			before 1.5.1 allows ...)
104			TODO: check
105			end claimed by jmm
106
107			Once these are checked-in, then others will not do work on these TODO
108			issues.
109
110			Issues Not-For-Us (NFU)
111			-----------------------
112	thijs	6422	Processing your claimed entries is done by first seeing if the issue
113	micah	2985	is related to any software packaged in Debian, if it isn't a package
114			in Debian and has no ITP then you note that in the file, for example:
115
116			CVE-2005-3018 (Apple Safari allows remote attackers to cause a denial of
117			service ...)
118			NOT-FOR-US: Safari
119
120	jmm-guest	3029	Reserved entries
121			----------------
122			Several security problems have coordinated dates of public disclosure,
123			i.e. a CVE identifier has been assigned to a problem, but it's not
124			public yet. Also, several vendors have a pool of CVE ids they can
125			assign to problems that are detected in their products. Such entries
126			are marked as RESERVED in the tracker:
127	micah	2985
128	jmm-guest	3029	CVE-2005-1432
129			RESERVED
130
131			Rejected entries
132			----------------
133			Sometimes there are CVE assignments that later turn out to be duplicates,
134			mistakes or non-issues. These items are reverted and turned into REJECTED
135			entries:
136
137			CVE-2005-4129
138			REJECTED
139
140	micah	2985	ITP packages
141			------------
142			If it is a package that someone has filed an RFP or ITP for, then that
143			is also noted, so it can be tracked to make sure that the issue is
144			resolved before the package enters the archive:
145
146			CVE-2004-2525 (Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in compat.php
147			in Serendipity ...)
148			- serendipity <itp> (bug #312413)
149
150
151			Packages in the archive
152			-----------------------
153	neilm	5083	If it is a package in Debian, look to see if the package is affected or
154			not (sometimes newer versions that have the fixes have already been
155			uploaded).
156	micah	2985
157			If the version has been fixed already, note the package name and the
158			Debian version that fixes it and assign a severity level to it, for
159			example:
160
161			CVE-2005-2596 (User.php in Gallery, as used in Postnuke, allows users
162			with any Admin ...)
163			- gallery 1.5-2 (medium)
164
165	neilm	5083	If it hasn't been fixed, we determine if there has been a bug filed
166			about the issue, and if not, file one and then note it in the list
167			(again with a severity level):
168	micah	2985
169			CVE-2005-3054 (fopen_wrappers.c in PHP 4.4.0, and possibly other
170			versions, does not ...)
171			- php4 <unfixed> (bug #353585; medium)
172			- php5 <unfixed> (bug #353585; medium)
173
174	stef-guest	4001	Bug numbers can be added as in the example above. To avoid duplicate bugs,
175			"bug filed" can be added instead of "bug #123456" when the bug report has
176			been sent but the bug number is not yet known. The bug numbers are used
177			to add additional references for the overview page and the Security Bug
178			Tracker and they are parsed by a script that generates user tags "tracked"
179			for the user debian-security@lists.debian.org. This way you can generate
180			a BTS query for all issues in the BTS that are tagged "security" and are
181			not yet added to our tracker:
182	jmm-guest	3039	http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=security;users=debian-security@lists.debian.org;exclude=tracked
183
184	nion	6896	A special exception is made for kernel related issues. The kernel-sec group will take
185			care of them and file bugs if needed.
186
187	jmm-guest	3029	If a vulnerability does not affect Debian, e.g. because the vulnerable
188			code is not contained, it is marked as <not-affected>:
189
190			CVE-2004-2628 (Multiple directory traversal vulnerabilities in thttpd 2.07 beta 0.4, ...)
191			- thttpd <not-affected> (Windows-specific vulnerabilities)
192
193			<not-affected> is also used if a vulnerability was fixed before a
194			package was uploaded into the Debian archive.
195
196			Sometimes there are cases, where a vulnerability hasn't been fixed with
197			a code change, but simply by deciding that a package is that broken that
198			it needs to be removed from the archive entirely. This is tracked with
199			the <removed> tag:
200
201			CVE-2005-1435 (Open WebMail (OWM) before 2.51 20050430 allows remote authenticated ...)
202			- openwebmail <removed>
203
204	fw	5669	After a new Debian release, some packages vanish from the database,
205			and consistency checks might fail. In this case, a single <removed>
206			entry needs to be added to an input file, or the package name should
207			be included in the data/packages/removed-packages file.
208	jmm-guest	3029
209	jmm-guest	2991	Severity levels
210			---------------
211			These levels are mostly used to prioritize the order in which security
212			problems are resolved. Anyway, we have a rough overview on how you should
213	djoume-guest	5280	assess these levels.
214	jmm-guest	2991
215			unimportant: This problem does not affect the Debian binary package, e.g.
216	djoume-guest	5280	a vulnerable source file, which is not built, a vulnerable file
217			in doc/foo/examples/, PHP Safe mode bugs, path disclosure (doesn't
218			matter on Debian).
219			All "non-issues in practice" fall also into this category, like
220			issues only "exploitable" if the code in question is setuid root,
221			exploits which only work if someone already has administrative
222			privileges or similar.
223
224	jmm-guest	2991	low : A security problem, which has only mild security implications
225			and one would even be comfortable with if it continues to
226	djoume-guest	5280	be present (local DoS, /tmp file races and so on).
227
228			medium : For anything which permits code execution after user interaction.
229			Local privilege escalation vulnerabilities are in this category as
230			well, or remote privilege escalation if it's constrained to the
231			application (i.e. no shell access to the underlying system, such
232			as simple cross-site scripting). Most remote DoS vulnerabilities
233			fall into this category, too.
234
235	jmm-guest	2991	high : A typical, exploitable security problem, which you'll really
236	jmm-guest	3029	like to fix or at least implement a workaround. This could
237	jmm-guest	2991	be because the vulnerable code is very broadly used, because
238			an exploit is in the wild or because the attack vector is
239	djoume-guest	5280	very wide.
240			Should be put into that category anything that permits an attacker
241			to execute arbitrary code on the vulnerable system (with or
242			without root privileges) and high-impact denial-of-service bugs
243			(for instance, an IPv4 forwarding path vulnerability which
244			requires only very few packets to exploit).
245			Significant defects in security software can be rated "high" as
246			well (for instance, a vulnerability in a piece of cryptographic
247			software which flags forged digital signatures as genuine).
248	jmm-guest	2991
249	djoume-guest	5280
250			Certain packages may get higher or lower rating than usual, based on
251			their importance.
252
253
254	micah	2985	NOTE and TODO entries
255			---------------------
256			There are many instances where more work has to be done to determine
257			if something is affected, and you might not be able to do this at the
258			time. These entries can have their TODO line changed to something
259			descriptive so that it is clear what remains to be done. For example:
260
261			CVE-2005-3990 (Directory traversal vulnerability in FastJar 0.93
262			allows remote ...)
263			TODO: check, whether fastjar from the gcc source packages is affected
264
265			It is also useful to add information to issues as you find it, so that
266			when others go to look at an issue and want to know why you marked it
267			as you did, or need a reference, it will be there. The more
268			information left, the better. For example, the following entry lets
269			you know that CVE-2005-3258 doesn't affect the squid that we have
270			because the issue was introduced in a patch that was never applied to
271			the Debian package:
272
273			CVE-2005-3258 (The rfc1738_do_escape function in ftp.c for Squid 2.5
274			STABLE11 and ...)
275			- squid <not-affected> (bug #334882; medium)
276			NOTE: Bug was introduced in a patch to squid-2.5.STABLE10,
277			NOTE: this patch was never applied to the Debian package.
278
279	jmm-guest	3027	Distribution tags
280			-----------------
281			Our data is primarily targeted at sid, as we track the version that
282			a certain issue was fixed in sid. The Security Tracker web site (see
283			below) derives information about the applicability of a vulnerability
284			to stable and oldstable from the list of DSAs issued by the security
285			team and the fact that a source package is part of a release.
286			Distribution tags can be used to denote information about a vulnerability
287			for the version of a package in a specific release. An example:
288	micah	2985
289	jmm-guest	3027	CVE-2005-3974 (Drupal 4.5.0 through 4.5.5 and 4.6.0 through 4.6.3, when running on ...)
290			- drupal 4.5.6-1 (low)
291			[sarge] - drupal <not-affected> (Only vulnerable if running PHP 5)
292
293			Drupal has been fixed since 4.5.6, however Drupal from Sarge still isn't
294			vulnerable as the vulnerability is only effective when run under PHP 5,
295			which isn't part of Sarge.
296
297	micah	2985	Generated Reports
298			-----------------
299			All of this tracking information gets automatically parsed and
300			compared against madison to determine what has been fixed and what is
301	joeyh	4589	still waiting, this results in this website:
302	micah	2985
303	joeyh	4589	http://security-tracker.debian.net/
304	micah	2985
305	joeyh	4589	It incorporates package lists and parses distribution lists and can
306			thus be used to
307			- Present the security history of a package
308			- Provide overviews of vulnerable packages in stable, testing, sid and
309			oldstable (it still has some false positives, wrt packages in
310			stable that are present in stable, but not vulnerable, but these
311			will be ironed out soon). The oldstable data is likely inaccurate.
312			- Generate a list of packages that are subject to security problems, but
313			stuck in testing migration due to problems with the dependency chain
314			and thus candidates for a DTSA
315	tedp-guest	6022	- Generate a list of TODO issues that need to be addressed
316	joeyh	4589	- Generate a list of packages that will enter Debian soon and need to
317			be checked for security problems
318			- Generate a list of provisional IDs that need to be turned into proper
319			CVE entries
320			- Show some potential problems in the data pool (e.g. misspelled package
321			names not found in the packages list, or potentially missing epochs)
322	micah	2985
323	joeyh	4589	For every security problem it displays
324			- The CVE information
325			- A severity assessment by NVD
326			- Cross references to DTSAs, DSAs and bugs in the BTS
327			- The status of a security problem in stable, oldstable, testing and sid
328			- Additional notes from our tracker
329	micah	2985
330	jmm-guest	3030	The DSA list
331			------------
332			We maintain a list of all DSA advisories issued by the stable security
333			team. This information is used to derive information about the state
334			of security problems for the stable and oldstable distribution. An
335			entry for a DSA looks like this:
336
337			[21 Nov 2005] DSA-903-1 unzip - race condition
338			{CVE-2005-2475}
339			[woody] - unzip 5.50-1woody4
340			[sarge] - unzip 5.52-1sarge2
341			NOTE: fixed in testing at time of DSA
342
343	micah	3614	The first line tracks the date, when a DSA was issued, the DSA
344			identifier, the affected source package and the type of vulnerability.
345			The second line performs a cross-reference to the entry in CVE/list
346			that maintains the state of the vulnerability in sid. Every entry that
347			is added like this to DSA/list is parsed by a script and automatically
348			added to CVE/list. The next lines contain the fixes for stable and
349			optionally oldstable, addressed with distribution tags. You may add
350			NOTE: entries freely, we use a NOTE entry for statistical purposes
351			that tracks, when a fix has reached testing relative to the time when
352			it hit stable.
353	jmm-guest	3030
354	micah	3615	There is no need to add anything to CVE/list for a DSA, the DSA
355			cross-reference will be added automatically by the cron job. However,
356			you do need to add [sarge] or [woody] entries to CVE/list when there
357	micah	3614	is a 'no-dsa' or 'not-affected' condition.
358
359	fw	3107	The bin/dsa2list script can be used to generate a template for a new
360			DSA entry once the official DSA is published on the web. You should
361			not blindly trust the script output and double-check it, though.
362
363	nion	6899	Checking your changes
364			---------------------
365			Commits are checked for syntax errors before they are actually committed,
366			and you'll receive an error and your commit is aborted if it is in error.
367			To check your changes yourself beforehand, use "make check-syntax" from
368			the root of the svn directory.
369
370	micah	2985	Following up on security issues
371			-------------------------------
372			By simply loading this page and doing a little gardening of the
373			different issues many things can be done. One thing is that you can
374			read all the bug reports of each issue and see if new information has
375			been added to the end that might provide updated or changed
376			information (such as if an issue has been closed, or a version of the
377			package has been uploaded that contains the fix). It is also useful to
378			follow-up on the issues to prod the maintainer to deal with the issue,
379			which they may have forgotten about.
380
381
382			IRC Channel
383			-----------
384			We hang-out on #debian-security on OFTC, stop by the IRC channel if
385			you'd like, also we can add you to the alioth project so you have svn
386			write permission and you can test drive it on the testing issues for
387			however long you like to get an idea or feel comfortable (and hey it
388			helps!)
389
390
391			TODO:
392			document DTSAs
393			document tsck
394	jmm-guest	3032	document CVE-XXXX
395			document tracked tag