QtCS2018 Third-Party Sources Policy and Security

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?
  • To be investigated (QTBUG-68816)
• 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