Xen Cloud Fix Shows the Right Way To Patch Open-Source Flaws

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 2, 2014 @02:50AM from the steady-as-she-goes dept.

darthcamaro writes Amazon, Rackspace and IBM have all patched their public clouds over the last several days due to a vulnerability in the Xen hypervisor. According to a new report, the Xen project was first advised of the issue two weeks ago, but instead of the knee jerk type reactions we've seen with Heartbleed and now Shellshock, the Xen project privately fixed the bug and waited until all the major Xen deployments were patched before any details were released. Isn't this the way that all open-source projects should fix security issues? And if it's not, what is?

1 of 81 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:"Gave them time" not "Waited" by nman64 · 2014-10-02 04:20 · Score: 4, Interesting

Actually, the flaw in bash was also embargoed for a couple of weeks. The problem is that the original patch that was given time to circulate didn't fully fix the issue, and nobody realized that until after the embargo was lifted and the problem became public knowledge. "Responsible disclosure" was exercised in both cases, it just didn't work out well with Shellshock.