Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I had a researcher contact me about a "vuln" in an OSS effort of mine once. The vuln made no sense w/ how the tool was used, but they published and I earned a CVE scarlet letter nonetheless. I finally "fixed" it, but IMHO, nothing was ever broken or vulnerable.



I wouldn't call a CVE a scarlet letter. Given the current state of software engineering, it's more like "my project is valuable enough to be used by someone that cares about security". You fixed it, one less bug to worry about. No doubt there are many less popular products with many worse vulnerabilities that don't have a CVE.

Even OpenBSD had to change their tagline to "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!" (from "Five years without a remote hole in the default install!") Still a pretty impressive track record.


> You fixed it, one less bug to worry about.

Those "bugs" can be features though - or the work involved to fix the bug meant that high-impact feature work - or other bugfixes, had to be postponed or even cancelled.

Our SaaS frequently gets security "researchers" (read: people running online scanners) submitting emails through our contact-form informing us about click-jacking attacks on our login-page - the problem for us is that we have a lot of second-party and third-party integrations on unbounded origins that offer access to our application, and by extension our login-screen through an <iframe> on their own origin, which is sometimes even an on-prem LAN web-server accessed through embedded devices where we can't use popups to do it properly - let alone switch to a more robust OIDC system - so there is no easy solution that makes the "I ran a tool, gimme $100" people go-away without causing a much bigger problem to now exist.


> there is no easy solution that makes the "I ran a tool, gimme $100" people go-away

I use the "mark as spam" button :)


> so there is no easy solution that makes the "I ran a tool, gimme $100" people go-away without causing a much bigger problem to now exist.

Maybe consider setting up a free-tier HackerOne bounty program? I think they triage to some degree on your behalf.


In the free tier? Triage is a paid service.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: