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

[John Helmert III <ajak () gentoo org>]

On Sun, Jan 23, 2022 at 02:15:30PM -0500, Leo Famulari wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 22, 2022 at 10:02:46PM -0600, John Helmert III wrote:
> > With this big of a gap between releases and security advisories, it
> > seems that users and distributors will be unaware of the necessity of
> > updating due to security fixes, sometimes for weeks after the
> > release. Why not always publish advisories close to new releases?
>
> Since (almost?) every WebKitGTK update includes fixes for bugs that
> allow remote execution of arbitrary code, I'd expect that distributors
> are well aware that every update is critical.
>
> And given the complexity of a fully-featured browser engine, it probably
> cannot be any other way: it's the same story for Firefox and Chrome.

I don't think it makes much sense for every downstream to make these
kinds of assumptions. 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.

It probably also doesn't help that a lot of WebKit vulnerabilities
also affect Apple products, given many times WebKit advisories are
delayed until after the associated CVEs are made public by Apple
security advisories.

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