114 lines
5.3 KiB
Markdown
114 lines
5.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Vulnerability disclosure
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sort_key: A
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---
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## About disclosures
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In the software world, it is expected for security vulnerabilities to be immediately
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announced, thus giving operators an opportunity to take protective measure against
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attackers.
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Vulnerabilies typically take two forms:
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1. Vulnerabilies that, if exploited, would harm the software operator. In the case of
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go-ethereum, examples would be:
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- A bug that would allow remote reading or writing of OS files, or
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- Remote command execution, or
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- Bugs that would leak cryptographic keys
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2. Vulnerabilies that, if exploited, would harm the Ethereum mainnet. In the case of
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go-ethereum, examples would be:
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- Consensus vulnerabilities, which would cause a chain split,
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- Denial-of-service during block processing, whereby a malicious transaction could cause the geth-portion of the network to crash.
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- Denial-of-service via p2p networking, whereby portions of the network could be made
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inaccessible due to crashes or resource consumption.
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In most cases so far, vulnerabilities in `geth` have been of the second type, where the
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health of the network is a concern, rather than individual node operators. For such
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issues, we reserve the right to silently patch and ship fixes in new releases.
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### Why silent patches
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In the case of Ethereum, it takes a lot of time (weeks, months) to get node operators to
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update even to a scheduled hard fork. If we were to highlight that a release contains
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important consensus or DoS fixes, there is always a risk of someone trying to beat node
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operators to the punch, and exploit the vulnerability. Delaying a potential attack
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sufficiently to make the majority of node operators immune may be worth the temporary loss
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of transparency.
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The primary goal for the Geth team is the health of the Ethereum network as a whole, and
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the decision whether or not to publish details about a serious vulnerability boils down to
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minimizing the risk and/or impact of discovery and exploitation.
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At certain times, it's better to remain silent. This practice is also followed by other
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projects such as
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[Monero](https://www.getmonero.org/2017/05/17/disclosure-of-a-major-bug-in-cryptonote-based-currencies.html),
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[ZCash](https://electriccoin.co/blog/zcash-counterfeiting-vulnerability-successfully-remediated/)
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and
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[Bitcoin](https://www.coindesk.com/the-latest-bitcoin-bug-was-so-bad-developers-kept-its-full-details-a-secret).
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### Public transparency
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As of November 2020, our policy going forward is:
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- If we silently fix a vulnerability and include the fix in release `X`, then,
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- After 4-8 weeks, we will disclose that `X` contained a security-fix.
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- After an additional 4-8 weeks, we will publish the details about the vulnerability.
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We hope that this provides sufficient balance between transparency versus the need for
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secrecy, and aids node operators and downstream projects in keeping up to date with what
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versions to run on their infrastructure.
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In keeping with this policy, we have taken inspiration from [Solidity bug disclosure](https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/bugs.html) - see below.
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## Disclosed vulnerabilities
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In this folder, you can find a JSON-formatted list
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([`vulnerabilities.json`](vulnerabilities.json)) of some of the known security-relevant
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vulnerabilities concerning `geth`.
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As of `geth` version `1.9.25`, geth has a built-in command to check whether it is affected
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by any publically disclosed vulnerability, using the command `geth version-check`. This
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command will fetch the latest json file (and the accompanying
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[signature-file](vulnerabilities.json.minisig), and cross-check the data against it's own
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version number.
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The file itself is hosted in the Github repository, on the `gh-pages`-branch. The list was
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started in November 2020, and covers mainly `v1.9.7` and forward.
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The JSON file of known vulnerabilities below is a list of objects, one for each
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vulnerability, with the following keys:
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- `name`
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- Unique name given to the vulnerability.
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- `uid`
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- Unique identifier of the vulnerability. Format `GETH-<year>-<sequential id>`
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- `summary`
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- Short description of the vulnerability.
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- `description`
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- Detailed description of the vulnerability.
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- `links`
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- List of relevant URLs with more detailed information (optional).
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- `introduced`
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- The first published Geth version that contained the vulnerability (optional).
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- `fixed`
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- The first published Geth version that did not contain the vulnerability anymore.
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- `published`
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- The date at which the vulnerability became known publicly (optional).
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- `severity`
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- Severity of the vulnerability: `low`, `medium`, `high`, `critical`.
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- Takes into account the severity of impact and likelihood of exploitation.
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- `check`
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- This field contains a regular expression, which can be used against the reported `web3_clientVersion` of a node. If the check
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matches, the node is with a high likelyhood affected by the vulnerability.
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- `CVE`
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- The assigned `CVE` identifier, if available (optional)
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### What about Github security advisories
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We prefer to not rely on Github as the only/primary publishing protocol for security
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advisories, but we plan to use the Github-advisory process as a second channel for
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disseminating vulnerability-information.
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Advisories published via Github can be accessed [here](https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/security/advisories?state=published).
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