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0 pointsstatquontrarian2y ago0 comments

"made no sense" from a narrow, CVE announcement perspective, but Maxim disagrees from another perspective:

    > [F5] decided to interfere with security policy nginx
    > uses for years, ignoring both the policy and developers’ position.
    >
    > That’s quite understandable: they own the project, and can do
    > anything with it, including doing marketing-motivated actions,
    > ignoring developers position and community.  Still, this
    > contradicts our agreement.  And, more importantly, I no longer able
    > to control which changes are made in nginx within F5, and no longer
    > see nginx as a free and open source project developed and
    > maintained for the public good.

I'm not sure what "contradicts our agreement" means but the simple interpretation is that he feels that F5 have become too dictatorial to the open source project.

The whole drama seems very short-sighted from F5's perspective. Maxim was working for you for free for years and you couldn't find some middle ground? I imagine there could have been some page on the free nginx project that listed CVEs that are in the enterprise product but that are not considered CVEs for the open source project given its stated policy of not creating CVEs for experimental features, or something like that.

To nuke the main developer, cause this rift in the community, and create a fork seems like a great microcosm of the general tendency of security leads to wield uncompromising power. I get it. Security is important. But security isn't everything and these little fiefdoms that security leads build up are bureaucratic and annoying.

I hope you understand that these uncompromising policies actually reduce security in the end because 10X developers like Maxim will start to tend to avoid the security team and, in the worst case, hide stuff from their security team. I've seen this play out over and over in large corporations. In that sense, the F5 security team is no different.

But there should be a collaborative, two-way process between security and development. I'm sure security leads will say that they have that, but that's not what I find. Ultimately, if there's an escalation, executives will side with the security lead, so it is a de facto dictatorship even if security leads will tend to avoid the nuclear option. But when you take the nuclear option, as you did in this case, don't be surprised by the consequences.

0 comments

MZMegaZone2y ago

OK - I need to make very clear that I'm speaking for myself and NOT F5, OK? OK.

Ask yourself why this matters? What is the big deal about having a CVE assigned? A CVE is just a unique identifier for a vulnerability so that everyone can refer to the same thing. It helps get word out to users who might be impacted, and we know there are sites using this feature in production - experimental or not. This wasn't dictating what could or could not go into the code - my understanding was the vuln wasn't even in his code, but from another contributor. So, honestly, how does issuing the CVEs impact his work, at all?

That's what I, personally, don't understand. At a functional level, this really has no impact on his work or him personally. This is just documentation of an existing issue and a fix which had to be made, and was being made, CVE or no CVE. And this is worth a fork?

What you're suggesting is the best thing to do is to allow one developer to dictate what should or should not be disclosed to the user base, based on their personal feelings and not an analysis of the impact of that vulnerability on said user base? And if they're inflexible in their view and no compromise can be reached then that's OK?

Sometimes there's just no good compromise to be reached and you end up with one person on one side, and a lot of other people on the other, and if that one person just refuses to budge then it is what it is. Rational people can agree to disagree. In my career there have been many times when I have disagreed with a decision, and I could either make peace with it or I could polish my resume. To me it seems a drastic step to take over something as frankly innocuous as assigning a CVE to an acknowledged vulnerability. Clearly he felt differently, and strongly, on the matter. Maybe he is just very strongly anti-CVE in general, or maybe he'd been feeling the itch to control his own destiny and this was just the spur it took to make the move.

His reasons are his own, and maybe he'll share more in time. I'm comfortable with my personal stance in the matter and the recommendations I made; they conform with my personal and professional morals and ethics. I'm sorry it came to this, but I would not change my recommendation in hindsight as I still feel we did the right thing.

Only time will tell what the results of that are. I think the world is big enough that it doesn't have to be a zero sum game.

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