What is Responsible Disclosure for Security Flaws?

Silverdot writes "In an article on ZDNet, the author brought up a few cases of uneasy relationships between security researchers and software firms. While those who report the bugs should first seek to notify and work with the software firm to resolve the flaw, One researcher commented: "All researchers should follow responsible disclosure guidelines, but if a vendor like Microsoft takes six months to a year to fix a flaw, a researcher has every right to release the details." Should the onus be on the software firm to manage each issue and the relationship well, or does it fall to the morally responsible user?"

Comments

Openswan project directly affected

[jehreg]

The Openswan project is directly affected by this this month. We were contacted by an agency and asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement, following which they would tell us of a possible vulnerability in our code. This non-disclosure would prevent us to release details of the vulnerability until such time as the rest of the "group" would be ready for it to be announced.

In the case of an Open Source product, we cannot even do a "stealth" fix; we have to describe what each patch does when we commit it to CVS. That would make the vulnerability public and would be a no-no to this agency.

In essence, the agency could decide which bug we could fix and which ones we could not.

I see this as the equivalent to blackmail: Sign our non-disclosure and we will give you a possible vulnerability; don't sign it and you will look bad when the vulnerability is made public.

I am a CISSP, and quite willing to hold on the patch until others can fix their code if the allowed time is reasonable, but the non-disclosure is broad and has no time limitations... So what the heck should we do ?