Repositories Overseen¶
While the Vulnerability Management Team (VMT) is available to assist developers on request even if their projects are not explicitly opted into this list, reports of suspected vulnerabilities for the following OpenStack source repositories officially fall under direct VMT oversight:
The teams responsible for maintenance of the source code within these repositories have agreed to meet the expectations enumerated below.
Requirements¶
Embargoes for privately-submitted reports of suspected vulnerabilities shall not last more than 90 days, except under unusual circumstances. Following the embargo expiration, reports will be made publicly visible regardless of whether any advisory has been issued or patch provided.
The VMT will not track or issue advisories for external software components. Only source code provided by official OpenStack project teams is eligible for oversight by the VMT. For example, base operating system components included in a server/container image or libraries vendored into compiled binary artifacts are not within the VMT’s scope.
Repositories must have versioned releases to qualify for VMT oversight. Vulnerabilities warrant advisories if they appear in official releases or on maintained stable branches (see Stable Branch Maintenance Phases). Vulnerabilities only present in master since the last release, or only on unmaintained branches, will not have their disclosure coordinated by the VMT. Pre-releases, release candidates and milestones are not considered official releases for the purpose of this policy.
The defect tracker for each overseen repository must be configured to initially only provide access for the VMT for privately-submitted reports. It is the responsibility of the VMT to determine whether suspected vulnerabilities are reported against the correct repository and redirect them when possible, since reporters are often unfamiliar with our project structure and may choose incorrectly. It implies some loss of control for the project team over initial triage of bugs reported privately as suspected vulnerabilities, but helps minimize the number of people who have unnecessary knowledge of them prior to public disclosure and so reduces the risk of prematurely ending an embargo.
The team must have a dedicated point of contact for security issues, so that the VMT can engage them to triage reports of potential vulnerabilities. Teams with more than five core reviewers should (so as to limit the unnecessary exposure of private reports) settle on a subset of these to act as security core reviewers whose responsibility it is to be able to confirm whether a bug report is accurate/applicable or at least know other subject matter experts they can in turn subscribe to perform those activities in a timely manner. They should also be able to review and provide pre-approval of patches attached to private bugs, which is why at least a majority are expected to be core reviewers for their repositories. These should be members of a group contact in the team’s defect tracker so that the VMT can easily subscribe them to new reports.
The team must identify a security liaison, serving as a point of escalation for the VMT in situations where severe or lingering vulnerability reports are failing to gain traction toward timely and thorough resolution. If one is not explicitly delegated, the PTL is that team’s implicit liaison.
Repositories should have automated testing for important features. Tests need to be feasible for the VMT and security reviewers to run locally while evaluating patches under embargo, and must also run within the context of OpenStack’s official continuous integration infrastructure. This helps reduce the risk of approved security fixes creating new bugs when rushed through public code review at the time of disclosure, and also decreases the chance of creating additional work for the VMT issuing errata later.
Projects are encouraged to undertake a review, audit, or threat analysis of their software in order to proactively identify likely security weaknesses. In the event the project team performs it, the results should ideally also be validated by a third party (which could just be other members of the community not involved directly in that project). Refreshing the analysis immediately following each major release is suggested, but an outdated analysis is still more useful than none at all. This is a recommendation in order to keep the VMT’s workload to a necessary minimum, but is not a strict requirement.
Updating¶
Proposals to add or remove repositories in the oversight list will be evaluated by the VMT following OpenStack’s code review process.
Deprecation¶
A repository should only be removed from VMT oversight under extreme circumstances, when the VMT is no longer able to adequately handle its vulnerabilities. Care should be taken to only discontinue vulnerability management for future non-patch releases, while continuing to handle vulnerabilities on prior maintained branches if at all possible until such time as they become unmaintained or reach end of life. See the Project Team Guide section on Stable Branch Maintenance Phases for detailed explanations of these terms.
