Re: WebKitGTK and WPE WebKit Security Advisory WSA-2022-0001

[Leo Famulari <leo () famulari name>]

On Mon, Jan 24, 2022 at 08:13:15AM -0600, John Helmert III wrote:
> I don't think it makes much sense for every downstream to make these
> kinds of assumptions.

Why not? History shows that this assumption will almost always be
correct for WebKit.

> Besides, this doesn't seem to be what's
> happening in practice. For example, WSA-2021-0006 was released on
> October 26, 2021 with vulnerabilities addressed in 2.34.0, released on
> September 22, but RedHat's bugs for it were only opened in the days
> after the *security advisory's* release, not the software release. It
> doesn't help that most most distribution security tooling seems to be
> oriented around CVEs, which aren't released for WebKit until after the
> associated advisory.

I'm sure that Red Hat's package maintainers know what a WebKit update
means. Presumably they are busy and their KPIs prioritize fixing CVEs,
so they don't act as proactively as one might prefer.

In general, it seems that WebKit is handling these issues like Linux.
Observers know that important bugs are fixed constantly in software of
this size and complexity. Relying only on CVEs is too reactive and
limited in scope to provide a meaningful security stance, increasingly
so since the CVE assignment system stopped working in the last few
years.

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