[bitcoin-dev] Responsible disclosure of bugs

Tue Sep 12 04:49:34 UTC 2017

Historically people have published vulnerabilities in Bitcoin only after
>80% of the nodes have upgraded. This seems to be the general (but not
publicly stated) policy. If you're a core developer and you know better,
please correct me.

This means that:

- a critical vulnerability, like a remote code execution, will be patched
immediately (without disclosing the actual problem) and all participants
will be notified asap. This is no different from any other open source
project. An example of this case was the OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability
that affected Bitcoin.

- a non-critical vulnerability, either because miners only can exploit it
or because it requires vast resources to pull, may require a wait of years
before publication, after a vulnerability was found and reported. This is
because the "natural" node upgrade rate is slow.

It also implies that some times a researcher works hard to investigate a
vulnerability and later he finds out it was previously reported. It also
means that the researcher cannot report to alt-coins which have a different
policy.

This policy has nothing to do with a loyalty to Bitcoin Core (or in fact,
the two or so developers that actually receive the e-mails to
security at bitcoincore.org).

This is a policy that has simply proven to work to protect Bitcoiners. It
began long long ago.

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 12:37 AM, Anthony Towns via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 07:34:33AM -0400, Alex Morcos wrote:
> > I don't think I know the right answer here, but I will point out two
> things
> > that make this a little more complicated.
> > 1 - There are lots of altcoin developers and while I'm sure the majority
> would
> > greatly appreciate the disclosure and would behave responsibly with the
> > information, I don't know where you draw the line on who you tell and
> who you
> > don't.
>
> If you can't pick even a small group that's trustworthy (top five by
> market cap as a start [0]? or just major bitcoin wallets / exchanges /
> alt node implementations?), then it still seems better to (eventually)
> disclose publically than keep it unrevealed and let it be a potential
> advantage for attackers against people who haven't upgraded for other
> reasons?
>
> I find it hard to imagine bitcoin's still obscure enough that people
> aren't tracking git commit logs to use them as inspiration for attacks
> on bitcoin users and businesses; at best I would have thought it'd
> only be a few months of development time between a fix being proposed
> as a PR or committed to master and black hats having the ability to
> exploit it in users who are running older nodes. (Or for that matter,
> being able to be exploited by otherwise legitimate bitcoin businesses
> with an agenda to push, a strong financial motive behind that agenda,
> and a legal team that says they'll get away with it)
>
> > 2- Unlike other software, I'm not sure good security for bitcoin is
> defined by
> > constant upgrading.  Obviously upgrading has an important benefit, but
> one of
> > the security considerations for Bitcoin is knowing that your definition
> of the
> > money hasn't changed.  Much harder to know that if you change software.
>
> Isn't that just an argument for putting more effort into backporting
> fixes/workarounds? (I don't see how you do that without essentially
> publically disclosing which patches have a security impact -- "oh,
> gosh, this patch gets a backport, I wonder if maybe it has security
> implications...")
>
> (In so far as bitcoin is a consensus system, there can sometimes be a
> positive network effect, where having other people upgrade can help your
> security, even if you don't upgrade; "herd immunity" if you will. That
> way a new release going out to other people helps keep you safe, even
> while you continue to maintain the same definition of money by not
> upgrading at all)
>
> If altcoin maintainers are inconvenienced by tracking bitcoin-core
> updates, that would be an argument for them to contribute back to their
> upstream to make their own job easier; either helping with backports,
> or perhaps contributing to patches like PR#8994 might help.
>
> All of those things seem like they'd help not just altcoins but bitcoin
> investors/traders too, so it's not even a trade-off between classes of
> bitcoin core users.  And if in the end various altcoins aren't able to
> keep up with security fixes, that's probably valuable information to
> provide to the market...
>
> Cheers,
> aj
>
> [0] Roughly: BCash, Litecoin, Dash, BitConnect, ZCash, Dogecoin?
>     I've no idea which of those might have trustworthy devs to work with,
>     but surely at least a couple do?
>
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