Disclosure: vulnerability pimps? or super heroes?

[jms at bughunter.ca (J. M. Seitz)]

Always a great debate, I somewhat agree with Marcus, there are plenty of
"pimps" out there looking for fame, and there are definitely a lot of them
(us) that are working behind the scenes, taking the time to help the vendors
and to stay somewhat out of the limelight. The ying-yang is very fitting.

On a related note, does anyone have an example where Company A was
disclosing vulnerabilities about competing Company B's product and got into
trouble over it? Is this something that could be litigated?

JS 

-----Original Message-----
From: sc-l-bounces at securecoding.org [mailto:sc-l-bounces at securecoding.org]
On Behalf Of Gary McGraw
Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 11:24 AM
To: SC-L at securecoding.org
Subject: [SC-L] Disclosure: vulnerability pimps? or super heroes?

Hi all,

The neverending debate over disclosure continued at RSA this year with a
panel featuring Chris Wysopl and others rehashing old ground.  There are
points on both sides, with radicals on one side (say marcus ranum) calling
the disclosure people "vulnerability pimps" and radicals on the other saying
that computer security would make no progress at all without disclosure.

I've always sought some kind of middle ground when it comes to disclosure.
The idea is to minimize risk to users of the broken system while at the
samne time learning something about security and making sure the system gets
fixed.

Disclosure is the subject of my latest Darkreading column:
http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=118174

What do you think?  Should we talk about exploits?  Should we out vendors?
Is there a line to be drawn anywhere?

gem

company www.cigital.com
podcast www.cigital.com/silverbullet
book www.swsec.com



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