Really, that Mozilla would let a reported RCE vulnerability simmer for two months until it bit someone would seem to reflect very poorly on their priorities and competence. Can anyone postmortem why it took so long now that it's fixed?
Firefox likes to bundle security fixes into .0 releases. 67.0 was released May 21 (and went to nightly/beta whatever May 13) and 68.0 won't be released for a few more weeks.
Is there a good reason for this? I would think that a security issue should be addressed and patched into user's computers as soon as possible, especially something like RCE.
Security fixes carry the usual risk of regressions (even more than the average bug, when the fix limits something that used to "work"). Therefore they need just as much bake time as other kinds of changes.
Also, shipping security fixes in stand-alone updates makes it much easier for attackers to identify security-critical changes (especially if they have access to source code, which they do for Firefox) and reverse-engineer the flaw. Firefox developers often land critical fixes with somewhat obscured commit messages to increase the work required by attackers to identify the critical security fixes in the torrent of commits that go into each regular release.
Obviously this only makes sense while the bug is believed to be unknown to attackers. If Mozilla believes the bug is being exploited, they can and do issue an emergency update.
> Firefox developers often land critical fixes with somewhat obscured commit messages to increase the work required by attackers to identify the critical security fixes in the torrent of commits that go into each regular release.
Wow, that's fascinating. Do you have any interesting reads to point to in this regard?
I’m confused what do you mean? Fixing security vulns can often times lead to regressions since overtime users become dependent on a behavior that relies on a insecure behavior.
