The Debian testing security team is a group of debian developers and users who are working to improve the state of security in Debian's testing branch. Lack of security support for testing has long been one of the key problems to using testing, and we aim to eventually provide full security support for testing.
The team's first activity was to check all security holes since the release of Debian 3.0, to ensure that all the holes are fixed in sarge and to provide a baseline for future work.
Now the team is tracking new holes on an ongoing basis, making sure maintainers are informed of them and that there are bugs in the Debian BTS, writing patches and doing NMUs as necessary, and tracking the fixed packages and working with the Debian Release Managers to make sure fixes reach testing quickly. Thanks to this work we now have a web page, that tracks open security holes in testing. (An alternate page tracks archive changes more quickly, but may be innaccurate due to bugs in madison on newraff.)
After sarge is released and once the autobuilder infrastructure is in place, we hope to begin issuing security advisories for holes in testing, and providing fixed packages immediatly on security.debian.org or a similar site, without the regular delay involved in getting a fixed package into testing.
Currently we're limiting ourselves to tracking security holes that have been the subject of a Debian Security Advisory, or are in the CVE database. It's very helpful to us if bug reports and Debian changelog entries include CVE numbers for security holes. If you don't have a CVE number, we can help you get one.
The team maintains a database (actually some files) that contain our notes about all CVEs, CANs, and DSAs. This dataase is available from subversion, and may be checked out from svn://svn.debian.org/secure-testing/.
While some individual members may have sources of prior information about security advisories (such as vendor-sec), the team as a whole operates only on publically available information. Any Debian developers with an interest in participating are welcome to join the team, and we also welcome others who have the skills and desire to help us.
The team can be contacted through its mailing list, secure-testing-team@lists.alioth.debian.org. There is a second mailing list, secure-testing-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org that receives commit messages to our repository. An alioth project page is also available.