Linux seems to have taken the reverse approach, by just filing their own bogus CVEs instead. One for every bug fix going into the kernel, rendering the CVE system useless.
That is not what they're doing at all, things get CVEs by a small 3 people committee judging on whether it may reasonably have security impact.
If this is rendering CVEs useless to you, then you were misusing CVEs to begin with. CVEs are identifiers. The fact that an identifier is assigned does not mean anything about whether the security issue is real and/or its severity. Assigning an ID was meant to help discussing things, including determining whether it is in fact a security issue.
It's only when they can't be sure there are not security implications. After all they don't try to build all combinations and so on.
So far in 2024 the Linux Kernel error rate is 3.21%.
Is that bad or good?
Let's compare to the top 25 CNA's by error rate for 2024:
f5 49.32%
atlassian 44.44%
Esri 43.75%
freebsd 40.00%
canonical 32.61%
Gallagher 25.00%
SNPS 25.00%
intel 19.74%
Anolis 18.75%
Dragos 18.18%
rapid7 14.29%
@huntr_ai 12.27%
Google 10.00%
directcyber 8.33%
CERTVDE 8.11%
Go 7.69%
lenovo 6.25%
mitre 5.53%
schneider 4.35%
GitHub_P 4.35%
Fluid Attacks 4.35%
Wordfence 3.56%
Linux 3.21%
snyk 2.94%
So... Linux is in at 24th place for error rate. But wait, surely those numbers are skewed towards some smaller CNAs that reject a handful of issues driving up their error rate?
Nope. Several of the mature CNAs like F5, Atlassian, Canonical, Google, Intel, Red Hat, Lenovo, MITRE all issue tens to hundreds to thousands of CVEs a year and have much higher error rates. Actually the worst CNA by raw numbers is MITRE (159).
Spamming this multiple times since people don't seem to read.
Is this related to the fact that the NIST NVD have had a huge backlog of unprocessed CVE:s since February?
How kernel CVE numbers are assigned: https://lwn.net/Articles/978711/ (June 19, 2024)
Good! We have environmental CVSS scores now, use them.
Really.
Assigning a CVE to every second commit and refusing to assign CVEs to unfixed issues doesn't seem like correct usage of the CVE system. I expect that most Linux CVEs will never get a proper analysis or a CVSS rating.
To me it sounds plausible that the design goal of the Linux CNA is to show that CVEs don't meaningfully apply to the Linux kernel. Given how dependent on context the impact of some kernel bugs can be, if we were assigning CVSS scores for the worst case, practically all kernel bugs would be at least a 9.8/10.
You're free to contribute your own analysis and CVSS rating.
So far in 2024 the Linux Kernel error rate is 3.21%.
Is that bad or good?
Let's compare to the top 25 CNA's by error rate for 2024:
f5 49.32%
atlassian 44.44%
Esri 43.75%
freebsd 40.00%
canonical 32.61%
Gallagher 25.00%
SNPS 25.00%
intel 19.74%
Anolis 18.75%
Dragos 18.18%
rapid7 14.29%
@huntr_ai 12.27%
Google 10.00%
directcyber 8.33%
CERTVDE 8.11%
Go 7.69%
lenovo 6.25%
mitre 5.53%
schneider 4.35%
GitHub_P 4.35%
Fluid Attacks 4.35%
Wordfence 3.56%
Linux 3.21%
snyk 2.94%
So... Linux is in at 24th place for error rate. But wait, surely those numbers are skewed towards some smaller CNAs that reject a handful of issues driving up their error rate?
Nope. Several of the mature CNAs like F5, Atlassian, Canonical, Google, Intel, Red Hat, Lenovo, MITRE all issue tens to hundreds to thousands of CVEs a year and have much higher error rates. Actually the worst CNA by raw numbers is MITRE (159).
Spamming this multiple times since people don't seem to read.
I think it's hostile in nature. The core kernel devs have a horrible attitude toward security vulnerabilities.
And this is why we write unit tests folks.
