Process For Publicizing Software Flaws Discussed

A new group has been formed to find a way to report security flaws in ways that don't make matters worse.

A group of software companies, security vendors, and researchers has launched the Organization for Internet Safety to develop a standard process for reporting security flaws in software.

Some security experts release information about flaws before giving vendors time to patch holes, while others release code that hackers can use to exploit flaws and attack vulnerable systems. Software vendors want time to develop and test software fixes before information about security problems is made public.


More Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

The organization expects to release a draft plan early next year, proposing that researchers report flaws to vendors before going public and that vendors take all reports seriously, says Scott Blake, a group founding member and VP of IT security at Bindview Corp. Details about vulnerabilities wouldn't be released for 30 days after a patch is published. Vendors such as @stake, Bindview, and Microsoft began discussing this effort a year ago. Caldera, Network Associates, Oracle, Silicon Graphics, and Symantec recently joined.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links