Schneier - Oracle and "Responsible Disclosure"

I've been writing about "responsible disclosure" for over a decade; here's an essay from 2007. Basically, it's a tacit agreement between researchers and software vendors. Researchers agree to withhold their work until software companies fix the vulnerabilities, and software vendors agree not to harass researchers and fix the vulnerabilities quickly.

When that agreement breaks down, things go bad quickly. This story is about a researcher who published an Oracle zero-day because Oracle has a history of harassing researchers and ignoring vulnerabilities.

Software vendors might not like responsible disclosure, but it's the best solution we have. Making it illegal to publish vulnerabilities without the vendor's consent means that they won't get fixed quickly -- and everyone will be less secure. It also means less security research.

This will become even more critical with software that affects the world in a direct physical manner, like cars and airplanes. Responsible disclosure makes us safer, but it only works if software vendors take the vulnerabilities seriously and fix them quickly. Without any regulations that enforce that, the threat of disclosure is the only incentive we can impose on software vendors.



from Schneier on Security https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/oracle_and_resp.html

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