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The Fedora-Red Hat Crisis
jammag writes "When Linux journalist Bruce Byfield tried to dig for details about the security breach in Fedora's servers, a Red Hat publicist told him the official statement — written in non-informative corporate-speak — was all he would get. In the wake of Red Hat's tight-lipped handling of the breach, even Fedora's board was unhappy, as Byfield details. He concludes: 'If Red Hat, one of the epitomes of a successful FOSS-based business, can ignore FOSS when to do so is corporately convenient, then what chance do we have that other companies — especially publicly-traded ones — will act any better?'"
The problem with a lot of corporate Open Source is that they ignore the ethical foundation of Open Source. And eventually we find out that Open Source isn't quite as good without the ethics.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
"Frankly" when business is more important than the customer, often the business isn't worth a damn.
Does this justify the word "crisis?" I doubt it does. In my opinion "conundrum" would be a better word.
At first read, the heading made me think that Red Hat and Fedora communities were bickering big time, threatening timely releases of software we have [all] come to rely on. Of course this is not the case.
So why the sensational heading?
This seems to be, from reading the Fedora and Red Hat statements, an ongoing investigation. The same way the police don't comment about investigations in progress, Red Hat is keeping mum. Keep in mind, the breach may be very complex and not something that they can confidently say "we understand" without a very detailed analysis.
They announced the issue immediately and took steps. For now, give them the benefit of the doubt that further details will be forthcoming once a proper investigation has been completed.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
IT managers now know that RH is going to go unresponsive when there's a problem.
The issue isn't even fully known, so you're jumping to conclusions.
For some reason Fedora has to re-key all their repos and, while I think that's done, it's still being mirrored. One would assume a signing key has been lost.
Redhat isn't doing that. They apparently have a signing server, and a user's credentials were apparently lost, and some packages got signed, but not put in the repos. If you run a RedHat machine and get an unsolicited contact to install some new OpenSSH packages - don't.
I think Fedora has the bigger problem at the moment. Let them work through the problem, they know how to do this. When the users are safe (still an ongoing topic of discussion on how to best ensure this) my guess is they'll be releasing more information. I further suspect we'll learn that prior disclosure would have put users at more risk. We'll see.
How can they trust Red Hat again?
Historically the Fedora guys have been trustworthy to the extreme. That's why not everybody is jumping on them right now, despite the distro-partisans who smell blood in the water. Again, we'll re-evaluate our position on that once the dust settles.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You're very trusting with all that money. Someone else in the same situation might truthfully report: my vendor is keeping me the dark, I don't know the nature and degree of my own exposure.
This would make me nervous.
Bruce Perens.
TFA says:
However, as of September 8, the crisis continues, with Fedora users still unable to get security updates or bug-fixes.
Not true. Go here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Enabling_new_signing_key, follow the instructions and voila... updates available.
Anybody want a peanut?
Exactly. It's not a breach of any FOSS licence. It's possibly a breach of FOSS project best practice, but that isn't clear either, because we don't know how the problem happened or what code had to be modified to fix it.
Even if some FOSS code was modified, there is no licence obligation to distribute the changes unless you are distributing the binaries.
As I understand it, the security breach was that someone gained remote access to their servers. It doesn't necessarily follow that any of the code served by the servers was faulty. Last time I checked, not all the code running Redhat sites was open-source.
And the breach could well have been down to a sys admin error, rather than a problem with the codebase itself. It would obviously be acutely embarassing if Redhat's in-house team turned out to have made the kind of mistake that causes people to fail their RHCE exam, but it wouldn't have anything to do with FOSS.
Also, there may not be a simple answer to the 'what does this mean for me?' question. In the Debian case, the answer was quite simple, and so was the solution. The Redhat announcements sounded to me like "We know there was a breach, we don't know exactly what happened as a result, we don't think anything serious happened, but, to be on the safe side, we are changing all the locks."
Redhat's PR department obviously misjudged the best way to handle this incident, but the expectations of the FOSS community also seem unrealistic. When a company open-sources some code, it doesn't mean that anyone in the world gets unfettered access to all the information in the company. Reading TFA, I can't help but think that it is at least partly motivated by the blogger's outrage that Redhat didn't roll out the red carpet all the way to the server room for his terribly important blog.
Virtually serving coffee
Someone else in the same situation might truthfully report: my vendor is keeping me the dark, I don't know the nature and degree of my own exposure.
That would be me - our RHEL5 system has the trojanized versions of OpenSSH mentioned in the Red Hat Security Advisory installed, and Red Hat did not provide the most crucial information for me: what harm these packages are able to cause (i.e. which passwords should I change, whether to look for secondary breaches on other - non-RHEL - systems, etc.), and how they got into my system. Also, they were pretty slow releasing the details. The packages were signed by their key on August 13, Fedora servers were taken offline a day or two later (so they definitely knew about the problem really soon), but the advisory was published on August 21. As far as I know I had the trojanized packages installed since August 15, so my system has been 0wned for 6 days, thanks to Red Hat delaying the information.
If Red Hat, one of the epitomes of a successful FOSS-based business, can ignore FOSS when to do so is corporately convenient
Sorry, but I must have missed the clause in the GPL that requires full and immediate public disclosure of any security breach on your servers, or a duty to maintain 100% availability.
OTOH I do remember loads of stuff in the GPL about how there was no warranty.
There also seems to be a presumption that this "breach" represents some sort of systemic vulnerability in the Fedora/Red Hat product - TFA and several comments here reference the Debian SSL problem. What about the good old standbys of "inside job", "social engineering", "weak password" or "bugger, I knew I should have password-protected my SSH key"?
What if they're planning to fire someones ass, or even press criminal charges over the incident? That would place serious restrictions on what they could publicly announce.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.