Paraphrasing: "The world's top security researches and AI labs are pouring all their VC money into finding as many security issues in curl as possible". At the same time, we know that curl is run by volunteers that needs to handle all of this. I'm not saying that we shouldn't do security review of open source libraries, just saying that this situation puts a lot of pressure on the maintainers.
The second unnerving thing is that many of the listed vulnerabilites target embedded libcurl; a library with a much slower update cycle. I'm guessing that many of the listed bugs are still in active use, inside the thousands of applications that use curl internally. Another tricky situation.
Both of these stand in contrast to the posts "braggy" style of "we found the most vulnerabilities of all!!!".
Another way to read it is that the public now have access to resources on a scale that was formerly the domain of three letter government agencies throwing millions of dollars to hire humans to do this work. While in the short-term it's painful for maintainers, in the long-term we all end up safer.
Would be great if people would brag with quotes and feedback from the maintainers. I'd be more interested to see that. Instead our model found x, I want something that really helps the maintainers.
> I'm not saying that we shouldn't do security review of open source libraries, just saying that this situation puts a lot of pressure on the maintainers.
This is true, and worth saying, but it is also a problem of the OSS philosophy. All software is used at your own risk, so if maintainers want their software used they need to keep up, and the (true) promise of "more eyeballs means more secure software" has this downside built in.
Thanks for making open source a bit more secure, even though your website is super laggy with all these ridiculous animations.
Based on the eye candy I imagine the team consists of a bunch of VC bros on their macbooks drinking chai lattes. Not sure if that is the impression you want to portray to a technical audience.
The eye candy might work with nontechnical VCs though, so you do you.
Edit: To elaborate on the nontechnical macbook user angle: If the tagline is "outsmart your adversaries" I wonder how you plan to outsmart anyone if your security company is set up on backdoor-infested MacOS or Windows systems? You can't assume that the backdoors put in by USUK are not known to other foreign adversaries. Maybe I'm wrong and they are a Linux/BSD shop (in that case more power to them).
The presentation from the time might be worth watching, if this reads too much like hype PR. [0]
[0] https://youtu.be/t4wqREXVEAc
There's something unnerving about this blog post.
Paraphrasing: "The world's top security researches and AI labs are pouring all their VC money into finding as many security issues in curl as possible". At the same time, we know that curl is run by volunteers that needs to handle all of this. I'm not saying that we shouldn't do security review of open source libraries, just saying that this situation puts a lot of pressure on the maintainers.
The second unnerving thing is that many of the listed vulnerabilites target embedded libcurl; a library with a much slower update cycle. I'm guessing that many of the listed bugs are still in active use, inside the thousands of applications that use curl internally. Another tricky situation.
Both of these stand in contrast to the posts "braggy" style of "we found the most vulnerabilities of all!!!".
If they don't do it, somebody else will. It's better white hats get there first.
Another way to read it is that the public now have access to resources on a scale that was formerly the domain of three letter government agencies throwing millions of dollars to hire humans to do this work. While in the short-term it's painful for maintainers, in the long-term we all end up safer.
Would be great if people would brag with quotes and feedback from the maintainers. I'd be more interested to see that. Instead our model found x, I want something that really helps the maintainers.
> I'm not saying that we shouldn't do security review of open source libraries, just saying that this situation puts a lot of pressure on the maintainers.
This is true, and worth saying, but it is also a problem of the OSS philosophy. All software is used at your own risk, so if maintainers want their software used they need to keep up, and the (true) promise of "more eyeballs means more secure software" has this downside built in.
Someone needs a lesson in accessibility
Thanks for making open source a bit more secure, even though your website is super laggy with all these ridiculous animations.
Based on the eye candy I imagine the team consists of a bunch of VC bros on their macbooks drinking chai lattes. Not sure if that is the impression you want to portray to a technical audience.
The eye candy might work with nontechnical VCs though, so you do you.
Edit: To elaborate on the nontechnical macbook user angle: If the tagline is "outsmart your adversaries" I wonder how you plan to outsmart anyone if your security company is set up on backdoor-infested MacOS or Windows systems? You can't assume that the backdoors put in by USUK are not known to other foreign adversaries. Maybe I'm wrong and they are a Linux/BSD shop (in that case more power to them).