Why does a CoC have anything do do with a maintainer stepping down due to a technical disagreement?
And the way you word it makes it seem like you think CoCs are bad or “forced”; I don’t particularly want to engage there, but I’d encourage you to reflect on why you think that.
As someone that has lived in several countries, and currently in Canada, I will respectfully have to disagree both about your opinion of the CBC and beliefs about government intervention. Some parts of Canadian local/provincial/federal government seem deeply dysfunctional, but some are extremely helpful and better than I’ve seen elsewhere.
You're seeing what remains of a strong and healthy period of Canadian history. But almost every facet is currently under threat and significant stress.
You can't fund a "news" organization with public money and expect them to be an independent agency that holds the government's feet to the fire. They don't do much more than add a thin veneer of objectivity and independent analysis for any significant government initiative.
The article posted above is just a small piece of evidence for the broken nature of the media. There is a torrent more spewing out daily.
Counterpoint: You can't fund a news organization with private money and expect them to hold private organizations' feet to the fire. Any time they are critical of a major business, they lose advertisers.
Personally, I have a problem with the viewpoint that democratic governments are some sort of adversary when in actuality, private businesses are the entities that have no accountability and we have zero direct control over. I agree there should be independent criticism of government, but IMO state media from a democratic government is naturally going to be better overall than only having private media.
Without government picking winners and loser (through protective legislation and regulation) the free market means that honest competition keeps corporations in check. There is an adversarial element inherent in the system. The reason we have so many entrenched monopolies is because they have captured the government.. a government that has no adversary and isn't even properly monitored by the corrupt and complicit media.
Everyone has their own interests in mind and so everyone has to be balanced against each other. Come on people we figured this out hundreds of years ago.
Tell that to companies doing extremely large-scale machine learning. Or any cloud infrastructure provider. Or CDNs. Or literally any video production company that owns a render farm. Or any company doing large-scale media transcoding/streaming.
Maybe "don't have thousands of servers" is just a bad take :)
This is part of what makes this class of bug so bad; it's not something you can "fix" at the IDP without doing exactly this. The issue occurs when a Service Provider (SP) is misconfigured, and in many cases the IDP doesn't actually get any sort of feedback that would let them detect the issue.
Wouldn't it be enough to enter an invalid audience when configuring the IDP? If the audience is ignored the sign-in flow still allows you to log on and you know the SP is broken.
Sure, but two reasons that's not quite optimal and you might not want to do that in practice:
1. This tells you the SP is broken; just using individual keys means that doesn't matter anymore if the SP is broken or not. Individual keys is in your control, fixing the SP much less likely so. And you can just set up a practice of doing it for everything and now it's one less thing to test for.
2. That still requires a bit of testing that's somewhat annoying to set up, which most vendorsec practices don't have time for. It's also only one of dozens of things you need to test for. Ignoring audiences is super common, but a more subtle problem is that you can sign a valid SAML assertion _for the wrong domain_, and now you can sign in as a competitor's staff.
As you hint at, having an SP that'll just self-service accept any random metadata.xml at least gives you a fighting chance :)
My question was more related to it being tedious. And now you say it requires a bit of testing which is annoying to set up. Isn't testing this just a matter of changing the audience field to something incorrect and try to sign on? This should take like 2 minutes?
If you just change the audience field, the signature will be invalid, so it might tell you the SP won't accept a bad signature, but it doesn't tell you that the SP would accept a correct-signature-for-wrong-audience assertion. And now we've explored two states in that very big tedium space I mentioned; it still doesn't tell you anything about e.g. canonicalization bugs or cross-domain bugs. Those are much harder to test, because they require your IdP to sign specifically crafted assertions malicious, so you can't test them with your standard Okta install or whatever.
So, sure: you can test this one specific bug by replaying an assertion for a different SP. Or you can make your IdP use new key pairs every time and then you're definitionally immune to the entire bug class forever with every SP. Even if replaying the SP takes 2 minutes, getting the tester to a place where they can exploit it takes way longer for most companies, so it's much more effective to just eliminate entire classes of bugs via policy.
TL;DR: you're right (modulo the amount of time) for this particular bug, but why bother? And if you're going to bother testing, why test for this one specific bug that's cheaper to avoid a different way? (I can think of a reason to test; but then the tedium comes in :))
It's a theoretical yes but a practical no, because the amount of people on this planet who understand SAML enough and want to work on it and are available for auditing, is damn close to zero, if not zero.
This is not an outlandish thing to ask of your security auditor _for your own app_. (It's something we do for clients.)
The challenging part is doing it for vendorsec, when you are vetting _other apps_. The timelines that stakeholders (other people in the company who want to use the app) are willing to accept are like, a week, and even if you somehow had a SAML testing praxis at the ready that enumerates all of the problems SAML has historically had, there's a lot more to test than just the SAML bits.
So: in summary: I don't think that number is anywhere near zero, though sure, it's not huge. The hard part is failures being silent and being in parties you don't control.
