Security Team

The Fedora Security Team's mission is to help get security fixes into Fedora's repositories as soon as possible to help protect the end users.

IRC Channel	#fedora-security-team[?] #fedora-security[?]
Mailing List	security-team - Security Team mailing list security - General security mailing list (good for questions)
Meetings	Schedule and Agenda
Current issues	Critical Vulnerabilities Important Vulnerabilities Moderate Vulnerabilities Low Vulnerabilities Unknown Vulnerabilities

How

Red Hat Product Security opens bugs in response to CVEs that get reported by MITRE. A CVE bug is opened along with any tracker bugs that are opened against the individual packages. The tracking bug notifies the package owner of the vulnerability. Generally speaking, the package owner should follow up with upstream to obtain a patch or the fixed source to push out to the repositories.

The problem is that many package owners either don't have time or they don't understand the need of the tracking bug. That's where the Security Team comes in to help. We work with upstream to obtain the fixes and then provide them to the packagers via the tracking bug. We also work with packagers to help them get these fixes into the repositories.

Work Flow

1. Find a bug (use one of the above links to find an open bug)
2. Own the bug
3. Determine if the vulnerability is already fixed in Fedora by examining the current version and/or talking with the packager
4. Work with upstream to obtain a patch or version where fixed
5. Work with packager to get patch or fixed version packaged and pushed as a security update
6. Close bug when vulnerability is shipped in Fedora repos.
7. Do a little dance.
8. GOTO 1

Taking ownership of tracking bugs

Each tracking bug we work on should have a person who owns it for several reasons. It would certainly be inefficient if the work was done twice, and collisions and misunderstandings might occur if two people tried to coordinate fix with upstream and packagers independently. For these reasons, we should indicate the fact we are working on the tracking bug by filling the Whiteboard of the bug with bugzilla login of the owner:

   Whiteboard: fst_owner=<owner>,[<owner2>,<owner3>]

As <owner> FAS ID should be used, as it simplifies further management.. For the list of bugzilla logins of Fedora Security Team see the Security Team Roster.

For multiple FST owners FAS IDs should be comma-separated and NOT contain spaces.

Hall of fame

TBD.