• Google Project Zero: 90-day disclosure is working, with 97.5% of reported vulns being fixed within 90 days

    Posted on August 2, 2019 at 10:12 CDT by • Comment in the Forums

    The details are a little more complicated, but not much. Google’s Project Zero has turned up 1,434 security vulnerabilities in the past four and a half years:

    Of these, 1224 were fixed within 90 days, and a further 174 issues were fixed within the 14-day grace period [granted when it looks like the manufacturer is going to release a patch shortly]. That leaves 36 vulnerabilities that were disclosed without a patch being available to users, or in other words 97.5% of our issues are fixed under deadline.

    Realize that Google has a vested interest in saying that their disclosure policy is good for all of us — debatable, but I strongly agree — and they come to the conclusion:

    If most bugs are fixed in a reasonable timeframe (i.e. less than 90 days), then we are only enforcing the deadline on a very small number of unfixed cases. And if disclosing a handful of unfixed vulnerabilities doesn’t substantially help attackers in the short-term, but does lead to the demonstrated long term benefits of shortened patch timelines and more frequent patching cycles, then it would follow that a deadline based disclosure policy is good for user security overall.

    Interesting report. Thank to Catalin Cimpanu, who has additional observations on ZDNet.

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