Bugtraq mailing list archives

Re: SendGate: Sendmail Multiple Vulnerabilities (Race Condition DoS, Memory Jumps, Integer Overflow)


From: Gadi Evron <ge () linuxbox org>
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 05:16:08 +0200

Theo de Raadt wrote:
Sendmail has been an important part of the Internet infrastructure and
has gained a lot of honour and respect.  Many people use this piece of
software and a lot of distributors/vendors are proliferating this
software.  They do deserve better, as do the users who decide to trust
this vendor.


Paul Vixie did not decide that BIND should become a critical part of
the internet, or that it became a virtual monoculture.  He made it
free.  The community decided to make it Internet infrastructure.

No, he said: "I am up to the challange and I will do my best." If he couldn't he would have been responsible enough to say "I can't."

If he stayed anyway and would have not been up to task (which he was), he would have been seriously attacked as well and maybe even it would have been taken from him.

At this point I should probably not Paul is critical to DNS and a big part of bind, but he would be the first to say bind and DNS are not *his*. I think it's great he's around.

Eric Allman did not decide that BIND should become a critical part of
the internet, or that it became a virtual monoculture.  He made it
free.  The community decided to make it Internet infrastructure.

I did not decide that OpenSSH should become a critical part of the
internet, or that it should become a virtual monopoly.  We made it
free.  Again, the community decided to make it Internet infrastructure.

I personally appreciate OpenSSH, yet you keep insisting on saying on this thread that because it is free you shouldn't be held responsible, be expected to do anything or even worse, be expected to work on this unless you get paid.

Maybe you should change your moto about being the most secure OS around?

Now you want to tell us that because the Internet community made
decisions like these, that we should be held responsible.  That we
have to follow YOUR procedures.  That we have to answer to YOU.

No one expects you to follow our procedures, heck, we are not the guys who re-coined "responsiuble disclosure" (which was a cool invention at first) as "work with us in our way or you are not responsible".

There are *no* procedures, you are held to your conscience. That said, I am sure you know how to be responsible.

On critical Internet infrastructure, which is global, there should be. No one country can make them.


What if we ignore your procedures?  What if we say no?  What will you
do then?  Continue to verbally attack us?  To what end?  To show that
you are thankless dogs?

Does it make you feel like more of a man when you publically attack
people who wrote good things that you depend on, which you never
gave anything for?

Isn't it you who every day make the same decision to run our software,
give nothing back, and then believe that you have anything at all to
stand on?

Open Source developers get attacked when they don't follow YOUR
procedudes, but SSH.COM can skip fixing security problems for years,
and you will be silent.

You (and others like you) should be ashamed.  I am done with this
conversation.

note: I only wrote parts of OpenSSH; it was based on older free code
by Tatu Ylonen before he chose to go commercial, and initially made
free primarily by Niels Provos, Markus Friedl, myself, and a team of
other people.  Now it is maintained by about 6 developers.



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