What would be the biggest downside if we just stopped considering severity low or medium security bugs CVE worthy?
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@bagder counter question what would be the downsides if we don't? Many organizations already have a hard time dealing with the vulnerability reports. They are drowning already in insignificant CVEs. And the situation isn't getting better. As a result important vulnerabilities aren't addressed as quickly as they could.
But on the other hand it's already questionable what's considered low, medium and high. Official scoring often does not match what an organization would do for themselves.
Whatever you do, for some people it will be negative. You have to balance the equation to be net positive. A really hard one to solve. Maybe even impossible to solve.
@bagder Keep an ID, any ID.
I see them as globally unique identifiers that are used in "did you fix this thing" context. As naming things is hard and we will run out of catchy names and logos...
The severity indicates "fix now" or "fix tomorrow" or "next release". Thus the combo Id, severity, mitigatio & fix is important.
Curl could use CURL-SEC-2026-05-ABC and it would be fine too.
I just deployed a modprobe.d line for rds_tcp but no ID yet
/cc @adulau (for soliciting his opinions 😉 )
J
@bagder We would need to refer to bugs as "the buffer overflow that's in src/foo/bar.c line 1067 in version 4.5.6, and line 1058 in version 4.5.7" again.
Arch Linux wouldn't care, but it would make the life of Debian maintainers more difficult.
@kpcyrd countless projects basically do this already, I don't think the world would fall over. It would be fewer CVEs to care about.
@bagder Anybody can request a CVE, not just upstream. It's less about project policy, if a real, medium-severity vulnerability doesn't have a CVE assigned, that basically just means nobody was bothered enough to request one.
@bagder I'd prefer to know what issues exist, even if it's a bit noisier (on the blue team side)
Trying not to normalise the deviance of not fixing issues at my workplace
@bagder macOS 15 still has curl 8.7.1. Those CVEs do not seem to have a lot of impact, if you ask me.
@bagder I mean CVSS is not a great scheme for ranking anyhow. Even v4 has the core problems of v3 (IMO)
@jacques we don't use CVSS, never did...
@bagder well now I just feel silly for assuming!
@jacques some background: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/01/23/cvss-is-dead-to-us/
A lot of "security researchers" would be sad that they couldn't pad their resumes with more CVE numbers ?
@bagder uhh, you sleep? that kinda seems like an upside though so it's impossible to say
@bagder Eliminating low and medium CVEs wouldn't actually make software safer; it would just blindfold defenders. It turns out that a lot of "minor" leaks can still sink the ship if they are left unmonitored.
@bagder Probably none
Attackers can sometimes chain lower severity bugs together to do something interesting, but the reality is everyone is drowning in vulnerabiliites right now
Everyone has already written off Low and Medium as "don't care"
