Re: Guix IceCat users have had early access to security fixes

[Mark H Weaver]

Hi,

julien lepiller <address@hidden> writes:

> Le 2016-12-15 02:00, Mark H Weaver a écrit :
>> Yesterday, Mozilla released Firefox ESR 45.6 and announced several CVEs
>> fixed by it:
>>
>>   https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2016-95/
>>
>> I'm pleased to announce that Guix users of IceCat have had early access
>> all of these fixes.
>>
>> Since November 30 (commit 9689e71d2f2b5e766415a40d5f5ab267768d217d),
>> we've had fixes for CVE-2016-9897, CVE-2016-9898, CVE-2016-9899,
>> CVE-2016-9900, CVE-2016-9904, and 4 out of 11 patches for
>> CVE-2016-9893.
>>
>> Since December 3 (commit 5bdec7d634ce0058801cd212e9e4ea56e914ca0c),
>> we've had the fixes that were later announced as CVE-2016-9901,
>> CVE-2016-9902, CVE-2016-9905, and another patch for CVE-2016-9893.
>>
>> On December 10 (commit 56c394ee4397015d6144dab002ee43fc7e32a331), I
>> cherry-picked the remaining fixes from the not-yet-released Firefox
>> ESR 45.6: CVE-2016-9895, and the final six patches for CVE-2016-9893.
>>
>>       Mark
>
> Impressive, thank you!
>
> I'm a bit curious though, how did you get these patches? Were they
> already advertised as vulnerability fixes at the time you applied
> them? Were they already publicly-available?

I cherry-picked them from the mozilla-esr45 mercurial repository.  They
were not yet advertised as vulnerability fixes.  Often they are only
labeled with a mozilla bug number, and the relevant bug reports are not
publicly accessible.  However, in practice most of the bug fixes applied
to that branch are potentially exploitable.

     Mark