Thursday, August 11, 2005

Responsible non-disclosure

I'm pissed at Michael Lynn throwing a tanker truck of gasoline on the
"responsible disclosure" pyre. It leads to overly politically correct
announcements such as this. Little is
gained from this type of announcement other than eEye getting a bit of
"street cred". Announcements like that damage Microsoft's business by
making organizations leery of server safety without giving them an idea
of what to do to protect themselves.

Personally, I favor full
disclosure but if we cannot live with that, I'd rather not hear about
the vulnerability until such time that the vendor can comfortably talk
about it. Many of the same arguments for "responsible disclosure" (I
really dislike using that term), can be made for "responsible
non-disclosure". Maybe the only way we can get back to the middle is to
push the pendulum further away from center?

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