Re: CVE request: epiphany not checking ssl certs

["Steven M. Christey" <coley () linus mitre org>]

If an application does not advertise a security feature, then in general 
we will not give a CVE because of its absence of the feature (I don't want 
to give out 50,000 CVEs for every protocol that does cleartext 
transmission... or uses DES... etc.)  Similarly, we generally avoid 
assigning CVEs to "defense in depth" fixes, although the line between 
"vulnerability" and "defense in depth" can get fuzzy.

The http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=564690#5 title says 
"Does not longer check certificates" which could be interpreted to mean 
that it used to check certs, and now it doesn't.  If that's the case, then 
it makes sense to assign a CVE.

- Steve


On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Tomas Hoger wrote:

> On Fri, 17 Sep 2010 14:19:03 +0200 Hanno Böck wrote:
>
> > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=564690
> > http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=b26ca29d
> >
> > Did this get a CVE yet?
>
> Any specific reason to only give CVE to epiphany if you want to start
> giving CVEs for this kind of flaw?  IIRC, not long ago, no
> WebKitGtk-based browser I tried verified server SSL certificates and
> all connected without any complaint or indication that SSL certificate
> was not verified.  None seemed to offer any configuration option to
> enable certificate checking.  I guess there may be / was some
> limitations on WebKitGtk side that can explain this.
>
> I noticed midori now uses different address bar background color, which
> seem to be similar to the epiphany fix described in the Debian bug.
>
> Oh, now I see you're probably asking for CVE for post-deb#564690
> behavior, not pre-deb#564690, right?
>
> --
> Tomas Hoger / Red Hat Security Response Team