Hacker News Reader

Comment by huslage | Hacker News Reader

It’s irrelevant how widespread it is. It’s a bad bug that should be fixed. Why do people always say stuff like this? If you’re running a system that is exploitable then you deserve to know about it and to be provided a fix. It doesn’t matter all that much how widespread it is. The CVE system doesn’t exist to cater only to highly exposed systems.

View on HN

It matters how widespread it is because humans have limited time and resources to solve problems. If these conditions only exist in 0.001% of installs, is it worth the man hours to fix it? Alpine may think not, because like others have mentioned, there are likely other higher probability vulnerabilities being exposed in order to meet the conditions for this to even matter. A judgement call can (and clearly has?) be made to prioritize other work.

The good news is that considering Alpine is open-source, you can be the one to make the judgement call that it is worth fixing and go out there and fix it ;)

A trivial-to-exploit auth bypass is always worth fixing, no matter how few systems are affected right now in practice. My question is whether it's worth giving the vulnerability a name and making a webpage for it.

Sounds like you should go fix it then!

0.001% of all Linux installs (including containers, CI workers, embedded, etc) is still a huge huge number. It should be taken seriously until proven otherwise

ok then, you should go fix it! and thanks for pretending the entirely made up number of 0.001% actually matters

Reply on news.ycombinator.com