Re: ncurses fixes upstream

[Mark Esler <mark.esler () canonical com>]

On 4/12/23 15:40, Jonathan Bar Or (JBO) wrote:

> Hello oss-security,
>
> Our team has worked with the maintainer of the ncurses library (used by several software packages in Linux) to fix 
> several memory corruption vulnerabilities.
> They are now fixed at commit 20230408 - see details here 
> (https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/NEWS.html#index-t20230408)
> A CVE was assigned (CVE-2023-29491) - it's still under a "reserved" status.
>
> How can we ensure those fixes get deployed upstream, in major Linux distributions?

(distros maintain "downstream" versions of the ncurses "upstream")

Ideally, a security patch should only include security relevant changes. 
If a bunch of a documentation or miscellaneous changes are added, it 
makes backporting difficult (i.e., the non-security relevant changes may 
not be desired or cause the patch to not apply cleanly to old versions 
of ncurses). The upstream patch is already made, but that's what I'd 
recommend for future patches. If there's a regression as Alice suggests, 
that might be a good opportunity to redo the patch format.

http://ncurses.scripts.mit.edu/?p=ncurses.git;a=commit;h=eb51b1ea1f75a0ec17c9c5937cb28df1e8eeec56

When you publish the CVE json5, you can references the patch URL and 
relevant bug discussions to help downstream. Including the CVE number in 
the patch commit is also quite helpful.

Thank you!

> We've reached out to Arch, RedHat, Canonical and other popular distros independently.
Which email did you contact Canonical with? I cannot find anything 
recent for ncurses on security () ubuntu com
> Thanks!
>                               JBO