Disclosure timelines from vendors - a promising practice?
I was just browsing the Red Hat bug report for the mod_imap XSS issue
(CVE-2005-3352).
In it, they included a disclosure timeline (possibly from Apache, this
is not clear).
I've only seen a handful of disclosure timelines by a vendor. But in
my opinion, it should be more widely adopted by those who want to
assure their customers that they respond quickly to vulnerabilities.
A vendor who responds quickly and effectively to security reports
would want to "advertise" this fact, I would think.
In this particular case, the timeline shows that the Apache Software
Foundation was ready to coordinate on a release shortly after initial
notification, but there were additional delays due to a coordination
breakdown.
Recently, large-scale comparative analyses on vulnerabilities have
emphasized the publication-to-patch portion of the disclosure window.
But the "known window of exposure" is actually notification-to-patch,
which can be much longer. Most top researchers include timelines that
would help provide this data, but it would be great to see more of
this from vendors.
- Steve
P.S. In general, disclosure timelines can make interesting reading.
They are highly informative about the twists and turns of the
disclosure process.