Hi everyone,
I am sending this email to all tf.org project mailing lists to ensure all maintainers are aware and on board regarding this matter. If you have any concerns or questions, please reply on tf.org Discord #general channel, where I'll create a thread, as I think it will be much easier than dealing with cross-mailing lists emails.
Background
When a security vulnerability is discovered in one of the trustedfirmware.org projects, it is common to request a "Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures" (CVE) number. This number uniquely references the issue, which can then be searched in the vulnerability databases. One of these databases is NIST's "National Vulnerability Database" (NVD): https://nvd.nist.gov<https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-51712>
Entering a specific CVE number in NVD search engine will allow you to easily find the details of a specific issue, for example:
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-51712
However, sometimes one is not looking for a specific CVE number but rather wants to list all known vulnerabilities affecting a particular project. For this, one can use the Common Platform Enumerations (CPE) search engine:
https://nvd.nist.gov/products/cpe/search
CPE is a structured naming scheme that includes information like the vendor name, the project name, the version / tag, and so on.
See https://nvd.nist.gov/products/cpe for more details.
So for example, https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-51712 referenced above has the following CPE:
cpe:2.3:o:arm:trusted_firmware-m:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
This basically means
*
CPE version 2.3 is in use
*
'o is the type of project, in this case it stands for Operating Systems (which is probably the closest match for low-level code like TF-M)
*
'arm' is the vendor (that is wrong, see below)
*
'trusted_firmware-m' is the project name,
Problem statement
It appears that CPEs used in NVD to reference vulnerabilities in tf.org projects differ a lot across projects. For some projects, there's even multiple of them. Sometimes the vendor is "arm", sometimes it's "linaro", or something else.
Some of the TF-A and MbedTLS maintainers have initiated discussions with NVD to get this simplified and unified, but it would make sense to align other tf.org projects as well.
Proposal
CPE naming rules are that the vendor name should the parent organization of the project. Thus the proposal would be for all tf.org projects to use "trustedfirmware" as the vendor name in their CPE.
For example:
cpe:2.3:o:trustedfirmware:trusted_firmware-m:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
cpe:2.3:a:trustedfirmware:mbed_tls:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
We're only proposing to change the vendor name here ; each project is then free to choose how they want the project name or the type of software project they want to encode there.
Thanks for reading,
Best regards,
Sandrine Afsa
