We make long term support releases of curl that we call Rock-solid curl.
We support each release branch for at least five years.
We only merge security fixes and important stability bugfixes into these branches for updates. No new features. No surprises.
We offer Rock-solid curl downloads to existing support customers. It means that there is no free and open access to these releases. To get access, become a customer!
Rock-solid curl is meant to greatly reduce the risk of regressions and yet be a safe and secure solution with full support. For the companies who want this extra level of attention. An even smoother ride.
We plan to make new Rock-solid curl release branches roughly every 18-24 months.
The first Rock-solid curl release
Rock-solid curl 8.9.2 is the first long-term support curl version. As the version number implies, it is based on the curl 8.9.1 release that we shipped back in July, with two security fixes and a small number of stability patches applied.
Once you have a contract with us, you can get it.
Who is doing this?
I, Daniel Stenberg, will be the primary support person for Rock-solid curl and I will do the releases, and most of the patching and the back-porting of what is deemed necessary.
Customers sign contracts with wolfSSL for this. wolfSSL pays my salary. I have worked for and with wolfSSL with this business setup since 2019.
What about “the normal” curl?
Nothing changes with or happens to the curl project and the regular curl releases because of this. No one is going anywhere. The curl license remains the same. The curl releases and the release cadence remain intact.
Support customers help fund the project by allowing us to pay developers.
Downloads and all Rock-solid curl information is hosted on the dedicated rock-solid.curl.dev site, separate from the open source project on curl.se.
On curl
Born in the late 1990s, curl is a client-side Internet transfer engine. Installed in over twenty billion instances it serves virtually everything that is internet connected: phones, tablets, cars, television sets, printers, medical devices, game consoles, helicopters on other planets, etc and it is an embedded component in a significant share of our most used and beloved apps, tools, games and services.
curl is the fruit and outcome from hard work by thousands of volunteers and is completely free and Open Source. The curl project is independent. It is not part of any umbrella organization or foundation and it is not owned nor controlled by any company.
curl is secure, fast and feature-rich. It is a defacto standard and key infrastructure.
In every software project that has been around for a while there is of course newer code and older code. A question that often pops up at least in my mind is then: How much of the old code has actually survived over the years and is still being in use today?
And how would you visualize that in a way that makes it possible to understand the data?
A challenge
This turned out to become my challenge of the week.
I started off writing a script that iterates over all release tags we have set in the curl git repository and for every such tag, it extracts all relevant source files and runs git blame on them. With the -t --line-porcelain options, the output is really easy to parse.
For every such release tag, we get a large number of lines with different timestamps. Then the script sorts all those timestamps, iterates over them, counts how many that were done within different intervals in time and outputs those counters in a formatted line.
Iterating over several hundred tags in a code base of curl size and running git blame like this is not a quick operation. On my decently fast machine, a full such round takes well over an hour. Admittedly there is probably ways the algorithm can be improved.
gnuplot
Once all the data is written, it is converted into a visualization using gnuplot. I needed to experiment. I had to experiment a bit to learn how to do filledcurves.
Take 1
My first take split up the age just as a percentage. How large share of the code has been changed within how many months.
Turned out rather hard to interpret and understand.
Take 2
The source code is always 100%, so how large share of the source code is written within which two-year segment?
I decided to split the time in two-year segments only to keep the number of segments down a little.
Also, I moved the labels to the right side as it is the side where you are most likely interested in reading them. I had to put the legend outside of the graph.
While I think this version turned out pretty cool, the actual number of lines of code and the growth of the code base is completely invisible in this version.
Take 3
What if I would do the take 2 version but do it based on actual number lines instead. I poked the script again, restarted it and let it run for another hour or two.
Better! This version shows the segments in a way that properly reflects the actual number of lines over time. It beats the weird percentage take from above.
Still, having the oldest code slide over on top of the graph like this and have newer code appear from below might not be the best way to illustrate this data. What if I instead swapped it around so that the graph would keep the oldest code at the bottom and add newer code over that?
Take 4
I think this shows perfectly fine how the exact same data can be experienced so much better if shown just slightly differently.
In this version below, I also experimented a bit on how to name the segments in the legend as someone pointed out that it may not be entirely obvious to everyone that I do two-year segments.
I could also move the legend into the graph again here.
Pedantic viewers of this graph will spot how the number of lines of code here is slightly different than the separate line of code graph shown in the curl dashboard. This, because git blame includes all the lines and the other graph is done using cloc which excludes blank lines – and probably some other minor differences as well.
Take 4 is the version of the scripts that starting now will be included in the curl dashboard.
Takeaways
More than 50% of existing curl code was written since 2020.
About 25% of existing code was written before 2014.
Almost 10% was written before 2008.
1254 lines (0.64%) are still left in the code that were written before the year 2000.
No, I don’t know how this compares to other projects of similar age.
If you want to play with them against your own git repositories, you will notice that there are some curl-specific assumptions in there that you need to address, but that should not be difficult to patch.
Follow-up
Kees Cook wrote an adaptation of these scripts to generate the same graph for the Linux kernel. In Python and using multiple threads.
Exactly eighteen years ago today, on October 30 2006, we shipped curl 7.16.0 that among a whole slew of new features and set of bugfixes bumped the libcurl SONAME number from 3 to 4.
ABI breakage
This bump meant that libcurl 7.16.0 was not binary compatible with the previous releases. Users could not just easily and transparently bump up to this version from the previous, but they had to check their use of libcurl and in some cases adjust source code.
This was not the first ABI breakage in the curl project, but at this time our use base was larger than at any of the previous bumps and this time people complained about the pains and agonies such a break brought them.
We took away FTP features
In the 7.16.0 release we removed a few FTP related features and their associated options. Before this release, you could use curl to do “third party” transfers over FTP, and in this release you could no longer do that. That is a feature when the client (curl) connects to server A and instructs that server to communicate with server B and do file transfers among themselves, without sending data to and from the client.
This is an FTP feature that was not implemented well in curl and it was poorly tested. It was also a feature that barely no FTP server allowed and subsequently this was not used by many users. We ripped it out.
A near pitchfork situation
Because so few people used the removed features, barely anyone actually noticed the ABI breakage. It remained theoretical to most users and I believe that detail only made people more upset over the SONAME bump because they did not even see the necessity: we just made their lives more complicated for no benefit (to them).
The Debian project even decided to override our decision “no, that is not an ABI breakage” and added a local patch in their build that lowered the SONAME number back to 3 again in their builds. A patch they would stick to for many years to come.
The obvious friction this bump caused, even when in reality it actually did not affect many users and the loud feedback we received, made a huge impact on me. It had not previously dawned on me exactly how important this was.
I decided there and then to do the utmost to never go through this again. To put ABI compatibility at the top of the priority list. Make it one of the most fundamental key properties of libcurl.
Do. Not. Break. The. ABI
(we don’t break the API either)
A never-breaking ABI
The decision was initially made to avoid the negativity the bump brought, but I have since over time much more come to appreciate the upsides.
Application authors everywhere can always and without risk keep upgrading to the latest libcurl.
It sounds easy and simple, but the impact is huge. The examples, the documentation, the applications, everything can just always upgrade and continue. As libcurl over time has become even more popular and compared to 2006, used in many magnitudes more installations, it has grown into an even more important aspect of the curl life. Possibly the single most important properly of curl.
There is a small caveat here and that is that we occasionally of course have bugs and regressions, so when I say that users can always upgrade, that is true in the sense that we have not broken the ABI since. We have however had a few regressions that sometimes have triggered some users to downgrade again or wait a little longer for the next release that has the bug fixed.
When we took that decision in 2006 we had less than 50,000 lines of product code. Today we are approaching 180,000 lines.
Effects of never breaking ABI
We know that once we adopt a change, we are stuck with it for decades to come. It makes us double-check every knot before we accept new changes.
Once accepted and shipped, we keep supporting code and features that we otherwise could have reconsidered and perhaps removed. Sometimes we think of a better way to do something after the initial merge, but by then it is too late to change. We can then always introduce new and better ways to do things, but we have to keep supporting the old way as well.
A most fundamental effect is that we can never shrink the list of options we support. We can never actually rename something. Doing new things and features consistently over this long time is hard if not impossible, as we learn new things and paradigms vary through the decades.
How
The primary way we maintain this is by manual code view and code inspection of every change. Followed of course by a large range of tests that make sure that assumptions remain.
Occasionally we have (long) discussions around subtle details when someone proposes a change that potentially might be considered an ABI break. Or not.
What exactly is covered by ABI compatibility is not always straight forward or easy to have carved in stone. In particular since the project can be built and run on such a wide range of systems and architectures.
Deprecating
We can still remove functionality if the conditions are right.
Some features and options are documented and work in a way so that something is requested or asked for and libcurl then tries to satisfy that ask. Like for example libcurl once supported HTTP/1 pipelining like that.
libcurl still provides the option to enable pipelining and applications can still ask for it so it is still ABI and API compatible, but a modern libcurl simply will never do it because that functionality has been removed.
Example two: we dropped support for NPN a few years back. NPN being a TLS extension called Next Protocol Negotiation that was used briefly in the early days of HTTP/2 development before ALPN was introduced and replaced NPN. Virtually nothing requires NPN anymore, and users can still set the option asking for it, but it will never actually happen over the wire.
Furthermore, a typical libcurl build involves multiple third party libraries that provide features it needs. For things like TLS, SSH, compression and binary HTTP protocol management. Over the years, we have removed support for several such libraries and introduced support for new, in ways that was never visible in the API or ABI. Some users just had to switch to building curl with different helper libraries.
In reality, libcurl is typically more stable than most existing servers and URLs. The libcurl examples you wrote in 2006 can still be built with the modern libcurl, but the servers and URLs you used back then most probably cannot be used anymore.
If no one can spot it, it did not happen
As blunt as it may sound, it has came down to this fundamental statement several times to judge if a change is an ABI breakage or not:
If no one can spot an ABI change, it is not an ABI change
Of course what makes it harder than it sounds is that it is extremely difficult to actually know if someone will notice something ahead of time. libcurl is used in so ridiculously many installations and different setups, second-guessing whatever everyone does and wants is darned close to impossible.
Adding to the challenge is the crazy long upgrade cycles some of our users seem to sport. It is not unusual to see questions appear on the mailing lists from users bumping from curl versions from eight or ten years ago. The fact that we have not heard users comment on a particular change might just mean that they are still stuck on ancient versions.
Getting frustrated comments from users today about a change we landed five years ago is hard to handle.
Forwards compatible
I should emphasize that all this means that users can always upgrade to a later release. It does not necessarily mean that they can switch back to an older version without problems. We do add new features over time and if you start using a new feature, the application of course will not work, or even still compile, if you would switch to a libcurl version from before that feature was added.
How long is never
What I have laid out here is our plan and ambition. We have managed to stick to this for eighteen years now and there is no particular known blockers in the known future either.
I cannot rule out that we might at some point in the future run into an obstacle so huge or complicated that we will be forced to do the unthinkable. To break the ABI. But until we see absolutely no other way forward, it is not going to happen.
(I wrote about this topic in my weekly email this week. This is the blog version, somewhat extended.)
Easy to read
Two contributing factors that make code hard to read are function length and function complexity. To keep source code easy to read, understand and debug we should strive towards keeping functions short and simple. Nothing ground-breaking in that conclusion.
I know, it sounds really simple and straight forward but in a living project that goes on for decades, code develops, moves and grows over time. What started out small and simple risk gradually turning into something else.
This of course because there are so many more factors involved that need to be given focus as well. Like security, bugfixes, performance, food on the table and getting more people involved.
Graphs graphs graphs
Last week I added two more graphs to the curl dashboard showing function complexity and function length growth in curl code over the decades: one plot for the worst function and one plot for the 99th percentile in each graph. For both graphs, the 99th percentile plots shrink gradually over time but the worst offenders grow. This means that there are a few functions that with attention could improve readability and code maintainability but that in general things are under control.
One of the main points for me with graphing the project from as many angles as possible is to unveil things like this. Areas that might need attention, and then keep a check on these areas going forward. Details like these are otherwise rather subtle and not easily detected when manually browsing around.
It has been said that whatever measurement you use to track engineering progress, that will then become the goal for what engineers work towards. I hope to combat this by measuring (and graphing) as many angles as possible of the curl project. To help push us in the right direction in as many different areas as possible.
Improve
I took it upon myself to improve the situation: to reduce the size of the largest function in the code base and to simplify the most complex one. Incidentally they were different functions: the largest function was the big switch handling curl_easy_setopt options, and the most complex one was the main curl tool function setting up a single transfer.
These two functions had simply just slowly and consistently been growing over time, in size and complexity. No one’s “fault” really and not with any specific plan or intention. The graph helped me decide to act and the pmccabe tool helped me identify them. We can of course argue about the specific method or number that pmccabe presents for complexity, but I think it at least is pretty good at actually identifying the correct functions and the exact particular score it sets is not terribly important.
Both pull-requests became > 2000 modified lines monsters, but they also had immediate and distinct effects on the graphs; which ideally should mean that the code readability is now a little better than before, making the functions easier to improve and work with going forward
Complexity
The single worst function in production code had gotten quite complex. I spent a work day on the case and look at the drop on the right edge of the graph below, made after my fix landed. Most of the job was to properly split the function into several smaller ones that made sense.
The single worst offender at this particular time was the function in the curl tool that sets up a single transfer job.
There are still some pretty complex ones remaining. Room for further improvements no doubt.
Function length
The worst offenders in terms of function size in curl have been of two kinds: state machines with many states and functions handling big switches for options.
In this particular case, this was the big function handling curl_easy_setopt(), and as we have over three hundred options having them all handled in a single function made it very big. The new setup splits that handling up into multiple smaller functions, one for each kind of input.
The largest one is now at over 1,500 lines. Still on the too large side of things but way better than before.
Going forward
Yes, I am a graphaholic and I seem to keep finding new ways to illustrate project status and development using plots on timelines. I am also most likely the biggest consumer of these graphs as I monitor them daily to make sure I have full control of how we are in the project, in every imaginable aspect.
I intend to try to continue simplifying a few more of the functions in the pmccabe toplist.
Let’s see what the graph shows in another three years.
The transition from Ubuntu 22 to 24 for ubuntu-latest on GitHub actions started recently with the associated version bumps of a lot of applications. As expected.
One of the version bumps is for clang: it now uses clang 18 by default. clang 18 introduced some changes that turned out to be relevant for me and other curl developers. Yeah, surely for some others as well.
clang and gcc
In my daily developer life I just typically use gcc for building local stuff – mostly out of old habits. I rebuild and test curl dozens of times every day. In my normal work process I use a couple of different build combinations that enable a lot of third party dependencies and I almost always build curl and libcurl with debug enabled and only statically. It is a debug-friendly setup.
Of course I also have clang installed so that I can try out building with it when I want to, and I have a large set of alternative config setups that I use when I have a particular reason to check or debug such a build.
CI to the rescue
There are literally many millions of build combinations of curl, and we do some of the most important ones automatically for every pull request and commit in the source repository. They help us avoid regressions. Currently we do almost two hundred different jobs.
Two of those CI jobs build curl using clang and enable some sanitizers: address, memory, undefined and signed-integer-overflow and use those builds to run through the test suite to help us verify that everything still looks fine.
Since it gets done in the CI for every change, I don’t have to run it myself locally very often. We have thus been using the default clang version shipped in Ubuntu 22.04 for this for quite some time now.
Undefined behavior sanitizer
When the clang version for the Ubuntu jobs on GitHub was bumped up to version 18, the undefined behavior sanitizer job suddenly found plenty of new problems in curl.
In code that had been running without problems for a long time (decades in some cases) on countless systems and on almost every imaginable architecture. Unexpected.
Picky function prototypes
Here is the reason:
The sanitizer now keeps track of exactly how a function pointer prototype is declared and verifies that the function actually called via that pointer is using an identical prototype.
This is generally probably a good idea and a sound sanity check for most programs but since the checker insists on identical prototypes, I believe it goes beyond what is undefined behavior – I believe some discrepancies are handled just fine. For example a signed vs unsigned pointer or void vs char pointers. I am however not a compiler developer and neither am I an expert in the C language specifications so maybe I am wrong.
Example
A function pointer defined to call a function that returns a void and gets a single char pointer input
char *data = "string"; name = (name_func)target; name(data);
In libcurl we set function pointers (callbacks) via a setopt() style function, which cannot validate the pointer at compile time.
When the code example above is tested with the undefined behavior sanitizer and its -fsanitize=function check (I believe), it complains about the mismatching prototypes between the pointer and the actually called function.
How this became annoying
For the example above, the sanitizer report is most welcome, even if I think it goes beyond what is actually undefined behavior. It helps us clean up the code.
For libcurl, we have a CURL * type returned for a handle from curl_easy_init(). This handle is used as an input argument to multiple functions and it is also used as an input argument to several callbacks an application can tell libcurl to call, etc.
This made us get a more descriptive pointer for the type when we build libcurl. For convenience.
The function pointer is defined internally for libcurl as a struct pointer, but outside in the application land as a void pointer. This works great.
Until this new sanitizer check. Now it complaints loudly because the prototypes for the function called does not match the prototype for the function pointer. The struct vs the void pointers. The sanitizer stores and uses “resolved” typedefs in its checks, not the name of the types visible in code.
The fix
Since we can’t have build breakage in the CI jobs, I fixed this.
We are back to how we did it in the past. With a plain
typedef void CURL;
… even when we build libcurl. To make sure the pointer and the final function have the same prototypes. To hush up the undefined behavior sanitizer.
This is now in master and how the code in the pending curl 8.11.0 release will look.
Disabling the check is not enough
While we could disable this particular check in our CI jobs, that would not suffice since we want everyone to be able to run these tools against curl without any warnings or errors.
We also want application authors in general who use libcurl to be able to similarly run this sanitizer against their tools to not get error reports like this.
Is this a clang issue?
Maybe. I just can’t see how this could happen by mistake, and since it is a feature that has existed for quite a while now already I have not bothered to submit an issue or have any argument or discussion with the clang team. I have simply accepted that this is the way they want to play this and adapt accordingly.
A historic footnote
In 2016 I wanted to change the type universally to just
typedef struct Curl_easy CURL;
… as I thought we could do that without breaking neither API nor ABI. I still believe I was right, but the change still caused an “uproar” among some users who had already built code and done things based on the assumption that it was and would always remain a void pointer. Changing the type thus caused build errors at places to a level that made us retract that change and revert back to the #ifdef version showed above.
And now we had to retract even the #ifdef and thus we are back to the pre 2016 way.
Post-publish update
It has been pointed out to me that the way the C standard is phrased, this tool seems to be correct. More discussions around that can be found in a long OpenSSL issue from last year.
tldr: the curl bug-bounty has been an astounding success so far.
We started the current curl bug-bounty setup in April 2019. We have thus run it for five and a half years give or take.
In the beginning we awarded researchers just a few hundred USD per issue because we did not know where it would go and as we used money from the curl fund (donated money) we wanted to make sure we could afford it.
Since a few years back, the money part of the bug-bounty is sponsored by the Internet Bug Bounty, meaning that the curl project actually earns money for every flaw as we get 20% of the IBB money for each bounty paid.
While the exact award amounts per report vary over time, they are roughly 500 USD for a low severity issue, 2,500 USD for a Medium and almost 5,000 USD for a High severity one.
To this day, we have paid out 84,260 USD to security researchers as rewards for their findings, distributed over 69 separate CVEs. 1,220 USD on average.
Counters
In this period we have received 477 reports, which is about 6 per month on average.
73 of the reports (15.4%) were confirmed and treated as valid security vulnerabilities that ended up CVEs. This also means that we get roughly one valid security report per month on average. Only 3 of these security problems were rated severity High, the rest were Low or Medium. None of them reached the worst level: Critical.
92 of of the reports (19.4%) were confirmed legitimate bugs but not security problems.
311 of the reports (65.3%) were Not Applicable. They were not bugs and not security problems. See below for more on this category.
1 of the reports is still being assessed as I write this.
Tightening the screws
Security is top priority for us but we also continue to develop curl at a high pace. We merge code into the repository at a frequency of more than four bugfixes per day on average over the last couple of years. When we tighten the screws in this project in order to avoid future problems and to mitigate the risks that we add new ones, we need to do it using policies and concepts that still allow us to move fast and be agile.
First response
We have an ambition to always have a first response posted within 24 hours. Over these first 477 reports, we have had a medium response time on under one hour and we have never missed our 24 hour goal. I am personally a little amazed by this feat.
Time to triage
The medium time from filed report until the curl security team has determined and concluded with some confidence that the problem is a security problem is 36 hours.
Assessing
Assessing a (good) report is hard and usually involves a lot of work: reading up on protocols details, reading code, trying different reproducer builds/scripts and bouncing back and forth with the reporters and the security team.
Acknowledging that it is a security problem is only one step. The adjacent one that is at least equally difficult is to then figuring out the severity. How serious is this flaw? A normal pattern is of course that the researcher considers the problem to be several degrees worse than the curl security team does so it can take a great deal of reasoning to reach an agreement. Sometimes we even decree a certain severity against the will of the researcher.
The team
There is a curl security team that works on and with security reports. The awesome people in this group are:
Max Dymond, Dan Fandrich, Daniel Gustafsson, James Fuller, Viktor Szakats, Stefan Eissing and myself.
They are all long-time curl maintainers. Knowledgeable, skilled, trusted.
Report quality
65.3% of the incoming reports are deemed not even a bug.
These reports can be all sorts of different things of course. When promising people money for their reports, there is no surprise that we get a fair share of luck-seekers trying to earn a few bucks the easy route.
Some reporters run scanners against the code, the mail server or the curl website and insist some findings are bounty worthy. The curl bug-bounty does not cover infrastructure, only the products, so they are not covered no matter what.
A surprisingly large amount of the bad reports are on various kinds of “information exposure” on the website – which is often ironic since the entire website already is available in a public git repository and the information exposed is hardly secret.
Reporting scanner results on code without applying your own thinking and confirming that the findings are indeed correct – and actual security problems – is rarely a good idea. That also goes for when asking AIs for finding problems.
Dismissing
Typically, the worse the report is, the quicker it is to dismiss. That is also why having this large share of rubbish is usually not a problem: we normally get rid of them with just a few minutes work spent.
The better crap we get, the worse the problem gets. An AI or a person that writes a long and good-looking report arguing for their sake can take a long time to analyze, asses and eventually debunk.
Since security problems are top priority in the project, getting too much good crap can to some degree cause a denial of service in the project as we need to halt other activities while we take care of the incoming reports.
We run our bug-bounty program on Hackerone, which has a reputation system for reporters. When we close reports as N/A, they get a reputation cut. This works as a mild deterrence for submitting low quality reports. Of course it also sometimes gives the reporter a reason to argue with us and insist we should rather close it as informative which does not come with a reputation penalty.
The good findings
I would claim that it is pretty hard to find a security problem in curl these days, but since we still average in maybe twelve per year recently they certainly still exist.
The valid reports today tend to happen because either a user accidentally did something that made them look, research and unveil something troublesome, or in the more common case: they have put in some real effort into research.
In the latter cases, we see researchers run their own custom fuzzers on parts of the code that our own fuzzers have not exercised as well, we see them check for code patterns that have led to problems before or in other projects and we also see researchers get inspiration by previous reports and fixes to see if perhaps there were gaps left.
The best curl security problem finders today understand the underlying involved protocols, the curl architecture, the source code and they look for inconsistencies between them all, as such might cause security problems.
Bounty hunters
The 69 bug bounty payouts so far have been done to 27 separate individuals. Five reporters have been rewarded for more than two issues each. The true curl security researcher heroes:
Reports
Name
Rewarded
25
Harry Sintonen
29,620 USD
8
Hiroki Kurosawa
9,800 USD
4
Axel Chong
7,680 USD
4
Patrick Monnerat
7,300 USD
3
z2_
4,080 USD
Top-5 curl bounty hunters
We are extremely fortunate to have this skilled set of people tracking down and highlighting our worst mistakes.
Harry of course sticks out in the top with his 25 rewarded curl security reports. More than three times the amount the number two has.
(Before you think the math is wrong: a few reports have been filed that ended up as valid CVEs but for which the reporters have declined getting a monetary reward.)
My advice
I think the curl bug-bounty is an absolute and undisputed success. I believe it is a key part in our mission to keep our users safe and secure.
If you consider kicking off a bug-bounty for your project here’s my little checklist:
Do your software engineering proper. Run all the tools, tests, checks, analyzers, scanners, fuzzers you can and make sure they are at zero reported defects. To avoid a raging herd of reports when you open the gates.
Start out with conservative bounty amounts to get a lay of the land, then raise them as you go.
Own all security problems for your project. Whoever reports them and however they appear, you assess, evaluate, research and fix them. You write and publish the complete and original security advisory.
Make sure you have a team. Even the best maintainers need sleep and occasional vacation days. Security is hard and having good people around to bounce problems with is priceless.
Close/reject crap reports as quickly as possible to prevent them from wasting team time and energy.
Always fix security problems with haste. Never let them linger around.
Transparency. Make as much as possible open and public once the CVEs are out, so that your processes, communications, methods are visible. This builds trust and allows for feedback and iterative improvements of the process.
Future
I think we will continue to receive valid security reports going forward, simply because we keep developing at a high pace and we change and add a lot of source code every year.
The trend in recent years have been more security reports, but the ratio of low/medium vs high/critical has sky-rocketed. The issues reported these days tend to be less sever than they were in the past.
My explanation for this is primarily that we have more people looking harder for problems now than in the past. Due to mitigations and past reports we introduce really bad security problems at a lower frequency than before.
From: Microsoft
Subject: Congratulations on your Microsoft MVP award
You’ve been accepted to the Microsoft MVP program
Daniel Stenberg,
We’re pleased to welcome you to the Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) program in recognition of your outstanding contributions to the community in following technical area/s:
C++
It was not a total surprise since I was nominated to this program earlier this year and I actually did the necessary steps of manually filling in tedious forms. The program has lofty words about wanting to recognize efforts like mine, but when filling in the form there is no recognition for Open Source or other of my areas of expertise. Since I had to claim at least two areas to advance in the forms, I claimed to be an expert on “C++” and “web”. Those items were basically the only two available options that weren’t plain Microsoft technologies. I at least know about C++ and web. Obviously the program people did not think I qualified for “web”.
In the form I only listed and referred to my Open Source work to back up my claims. I am of course not at all an expert in C++, but I do know my way around C. I suspect the people over there don’t care about the difference.
My take on this is that they accepted me in the category that was closest to what I primarily work with, and that my protocol work is probably not the “web” they think of.
What good will this do me?
I honestly have no idea and I don’t have any expectations. I don’t think it can do me much harm anyway.
I figure ideally it can get me more contacts and reach to people that has knowledge about things that can help me in my Open Source work – in particular with Windows related queries and problems.
I don’t feel too special or unique as this an award given to thousands of people, and in little Sweden alone there are like a hundred people awarded. But I still feel honored!
On Monday this week, I did a talk at the Nordic Software Security Summit conference in Stockholm Sweden. I titled it CVEMITRECVSSNVDCNAOSS WTF with the subtitle “Keeping the world from Burning”.
The talk was well received and I think it added something to the conversation. Almost every other talk during the rest of the conference that I saw referred back to it.
Since the talk was not recorded (no talks were at this event), I intend to do the presentation again – from home. This time live-streamed and recorded.
This happens on:
Monday September 30, 2024 14:00 UTC (16:00 CEST)
The stream happens on Twitch where I as always am curlhacker. Join the chatroom, ask questions, have a good time. There will of course be room for a Q&A.
No registration. No fee. Just show up.
At the conference, I did the presentation in under thirty minutes. This version might go on a few more minutes.
Abstract
The abstract I provided for this talk to the conference says:
Bogus CVEs, know-better organizations, conflicting databases, AI hallucinations, inflated severity scoring, security scanners, Jia Tan. As the lead developer in the curl project, Daniel describes some of the challenges involved and what you need to do to stay on top of security when working in a high profile Open Source project running in some twenty billion instances. The talk will be involving many examples from real life.
Differences
Since this is a second run of a talk I already did and I have no script, it will not be identical. I will also try to polish some minor details that I felt could need some brush-ups.
