QtCS2018 Third-Party Sources Policy and Security

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Revision as of 19:25, 12 June 2018 by Kkoehne (talk | contribs)
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Host: Thiago Macieira
Notes: Kai Koehne


Motivation: Intel Clear Linux has the policy to fix any CVE within 24 hours

  • Hard to do for third-party code that's entangled in Qt

Notorious offenders: Image plugins (eg. libtiff)

  • We should aim for using system libraries for all image formats
  • Work started already for macOS
  • Can we do this for Windows? (AP)

Can we just rely a lot more on system libraries?

  • Linux should be fine
  • Can we use Vcpkg as a common package management system?
  • Alternative: Build ourself, but as separate library, so that we can update it separately

Some are deeply entangled

  • FreeBSD strtoll and strtoull
  • We become responsible and need to issue a separate CVE

Discussion for Rules

  • If system library is found, use system library
    • Agreed
  • If not, use bundled copy
    • Maybe provide a configure option for that? -no-bundled-libraries, making all bundled libraries opt-in (see QTBUG-68815)

We should aim for always shipping latest version available

    • At FF time latest (minor) update
    • Continue follow minor upstream version

Security issues should block release

  • Existing releases: Release a patch
    • Issue: Chromium releases dozens of security related patches per month!
    • How to decide what is really critical? Sometimes non-critical issues escalate over time ...

First step is to actually document what we ship

  • We got better there, but still miss integration with configure to actually show what is included
  • Let's not forget the majority of our customers, who won't update Qt weekly, let alone monthly!

How often should we do patch set releases?

  • Current goal: Patch releases 3-4 weeks
  • We cannot do new stable patch releases for every single upstream version
  • -> It should be enough to provide patches for security fixes

Assign maintainers for Third Party Components

  • Some modules are unmaintained
  • Should we have dedicated maintainers for all third party modules?
    • Hard to get already maintainers for existing modules
    • This is for much more limited scope though
  • Monitoring system for upstream CVE's?
    • Yocto has a system

Qt Creator

  • Should it need security updates too?
  • Some customers might require that...
  • Clashes with some security downstream security policies