MD5 considered harmful today, SHA-1 considered harmful tomorrow

Ben Laurie benl at google.com
Sat Jan 24 00:39:24 EST 2009


On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 2:36 AM, Victor Duchovni
<Victor.Duchovni at morganstanley.com> wrote:
> You seem to be out of touch I am afraid. Just look at what many O/S
> distributions do. They adopt a new OpenSSL 0.9.Xy release from time to
> time (for some initial "y") and back-port security fixes never changing
> the letter. One can't actually tell from "openssl version" what version
> one is running and which fixes have been applied.
>
> Why am I back-porting patch-sets to 0.9.8i? Is that because there is no
> demand for bugfix releases? There is indeed demand for real bugfix
> releases, just that people have gotten used to doing it themselves,
> but this is not very effective and is difficult to audit.

It is not that I am unaware of this, I was pointing out what we
actually do. But you do have a fair point and I will take it up with
the team.

However, I wonder how this is going to pan out? Since historically
pretty much every release has been prompted by a security issue, but
also includes new features and non-security bugfixes, in order to
release 0.9.8j the way you want us to, we would also have to test and
release security updates for 0.9.8 - 0.9.8i, for a total of 10
branched versions. I think this is asking rather a lot of volunteers!

Don't suggest that we should release feature/bugfix versions less
often, I think we already do that less often than we should.

Perhaps the answer is that we security patch every version that is
less than n months old, and end-of-life anything before that?
Suggestions for reasonable values of n?

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