“That we remove “We strongly believe that the right to advance patches/info should not be based in any way on paid membership to some forum. You can not pay us to get security patches in advance.” from the security policy and Mark posts a blog entry to explain the change including that we have no current such service.”

At the OpenSSL Management Committee meeting earlier this month we passed the vote above to remove a section our security policy. Part of that vote was that I would write this blog post to explain why we made this change.

At each face to face meeting we aim to ensure that our policies still match the view of the current membership committee at that time, and will vote to change those that don’t.

Prior to 2018 our Security Policy used to contain a lot of background information on why we selected the policy we did, justifying it and adding lots of explanatory detail. We included details of things we’d tried before and things that worked and didn’t work to arrive at our conclusion. At our face to face meeting in London at the end of 2017 we decided to remove a lot of the background information and stick to explaining the policy simply and concisely. I split out what were the guiding principles from the policy into their own list.

OpenSSL has some full-time fellows who are paid from various revenue sources coming into OpenSSL including sponsorship and support contracts. We’ve discussed having the option in the future to allow us to share patches for security issues in advance to these support contract customers. We already share serious issues a little in advance with some OS vendors (and this is still a principle in the policy to do so), and this policy has helped ensure that the patches and advisory get an extra level of testing before being released.

Thankfully there are relatively few serious issues in OpenSSL these days; the last worse than Moderate severity being in February 2017.

In the vote text we wrote that we have “no current such service” and neither do we have any plan right now to create such a service. But we allow ourselves to consider such a possibility in the future now that this principle, which no longer represents the view of the OMC, is removed.