full-disclosure - OSS means slower patches

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Date: Mon Sep 19 14:56:54 2005
From: bkfsec at sdf.lonestar.org (bkfsec)
Subject: OSS means slower patches

Roman Drahtmueller wrote:

>
>Security vulnerabilities are usually dealt with "best effort" commitment
>on behalf of the vendors. It's going to be your decision as to which
>model you trust more: Simply relying on your vendor's commercial
>commitment, or, in addition to that, benefit from an OSS developer's
>personal motivation to keep and improve his reputation. Keep in mind that 
>with closed source, you can't really tell what has been changed in a fix 
>and that the fix actually addresses the problem.
>
>  
>
Not to mention that something that actually is a function of the Free 
Software/Open Source Software ideologies is a degree of transparency.

If you're measuring "time to disclosure" versus "time to patch" you most 
definitely should expect a difference because people are more likely to 
just disclose vulnerabilities in FS/OSS applications whereas people 
finding flaws in proprietary software tend to keep those flaws to their 
chest for a longer period of time than others - both for legal reasons 
and due to vendor requirements.

In other words, the difference in the development methods inherently 
makes the method of statistical analysis used invalid.

GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out... that mantra doesn't just work for 
computers, it works for statistics as well.

             -Barry