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"Pretty serious" is a major overstatement. Regardless if you want to report a security bug you should include the impact.

If you've never been on the other end of this - the number of false security reports with minimal details popular open source projects get are staggering. Many are unrealistic. People saying things like, if i give the attacker my password then the attacker has my password.




> Regardless if you want to report a security bug you should include the impact.

Assigning impact, even only as a measure of risk, is not the responsibility of the reporter.

A reporter must provide a fair description and a proof of concept. Calculating impact involves much more than that.


I would disagree that it is a fair description without some description of impact.

Hell, without impact, its not even a normal bug, let alone a security bug. The fundamentals of a bug report are "I expect X to happen when I do Y, but instead Z happens". Without impact, all you are saying is "I expect X to happen".


"Impact" is much more than just what happens when a vulnerability is exploited in a vacuum. That is the reason behind CVSS scores and incident response.


Sure, there are different levels of explaining "impact" and the reporter isn't responsible for being the final authority. They should have some idea though as to what the bad thing you can do with the bug is. (However, cvss scores are basically garbage)




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