- CVEs are gold to researchers and organizations like citations are to academics. In this case, the CVEs were filed based on "policy" but it's unclear if they are just adding noise to the DB.
- The severity of the bug is not as severe as greater powers-that-be would like to think (again, they see it as doing due diligence; developers who know the ins and outs might see it as an overreaction).
- Bug is in an experimental feature.
I'm not saying one way is right or not in this case, just pointing out my experience has generally been that CVEs are kind of broken in general...
If you run a web app of any sort, and you don't have "X-Frame-Options: Deny" in your headers, you'll get lots of "researchers" (that are probably bots) e-mailing you that you have a CRITICAL security issue.
"Beg bounties", we call them.
That very much depends on what service is being denied. Nginx is _everywhere_. While not a direct security concern for nginx (instead an availablity issue) it could have security or safety implications for wider systems. What if knocking out nginx breaks a service for logging & monitoring security information? Or an ambulance call out management system? Or a payment progressing system for your business at the busiest time if your trading year? There are many other such examples. This sort of thing is why availablity can be considered a security matter and therefore why DoS vulnerabilities, particularly those affecting common software, are handled as security issues of significant severity.
Viewed in this light a bug that enables a successful Denial of Service (DoS) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a security bug. A bug that causes a DoS or DDoS, but is not exploitable, would not be a security bug (e.g., some idiot added an infinite loop to the startup code). That's where issue triage comes in, a bug should never be assigned before its triaged. Sometimes triage results in 'we don't know enough' and someone gets assigned to evaluate the bug to answer specific questions before triage can finished. After triage is get assigned - or even better, a developer with a matching skill set chooses it to work on for the next release/sprint/etc.
But I agree DoS is kind of a strawman since everything connected to a network is vulnerable to some form of DoS without extensive mitigation.
What about serving certificate revocation list, with another system relying on say one day old cache? (Sure, that's "fail open" - but still...).
Or proxying LDAP for sync to a central auth/authz system?
Ed: proxy giving access to logging system goes down - alert on failed logins silenced, disabling rate limits for brute force attacks?
>And, while the particular action isn't exactly very bad, the approach in general is quite problematic.
