I wrote:
> Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com> writes:
>> On Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 2:54 AM, Josh Berkus wrote:
>>> I don't know that there's anything the PostgreSQL project can do about
>>> it. If anyone on this list is connected with MITRE, please ask them
>>> what they need to be more prompt.
>> http://cve.mitre.org/ has a "Contact Us" tab linking to the address I
>> mentioned. That may be a start as at this state this is far more than
>> 6 weeks.
> I'm inclined to start by asking the Red Hat security guys, from whom
> we obtained all these CVE numbers to begin with. Will check into it
> tomorrow.
According to the Red Hat guys, the fundamental problem is that Mitre like
to research and write up the official CVE descriptions themselves ...
which would be fine if they had adequate resources to do it in a timely
fashion, but they don't really. Apparently, most of our bugs are of low
enough severity to be way down their priority list. (Maybe we should
consider that a good thing.)
However, Red Hat did also point out a possible alternative: instead of
linking to the Mitre website, we could link to Red Hat's own repository
of CVE descriptions at https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/
for example https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2015-5289
This is not as unofficial as it might seem, because for several years now
Mitre has officially delegated responsibility for initial assignment of
CVE numbers for all open-source issues to Red Hat. (It's just final
wording of the descriptions that they're insisting on doing themselves.)
A quick browse through some of the relevant items says that this is at
least as good as cve.mitre.org in terms of the descriptions of the
security issues, but it is a bit Red-Hat-centric in that there's info
about which Red Hat package releases include a fix, but not about package
releases from other vendors such as Ubuntu.
As a former wearer of the red fedora, I'm not going to pretend to have
an unbiased opinion on whether we should switch our security-page links
to point to Red Hat's entries instead of Mitre's. But it's something
worth considering, given that we're seeing as much as a year's lag in
Mitre's pages.
regards, tom lane
