A Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is an entity within an organization with a core focus on the identification, assessment and mitigation of the risks associated with security vulnerabilities within the products, offerings, solutions, components and/or services which an organization produces and/or sells.
At Mirantis, the PSIRT follows the distributed model. It utilizes a small core PSIRT that works with representatives from the product teams to address security vulnerabilities in products.
The core of the PSIRT has the following responsibilities:
- Creating policies, processes, procedures, and guidelines for the triage, analysis, remediation, and communication of fixes, mitigations or other advisory information to address security vulnerabilities.
- Establishing a matrix of (tiered) product security engineering representatives throughout the organization.
- Offering leadership and guidance regarding product security vulnerability response and potential risk to the business.
- Acting as the collection point for incoming security vulnerabilities where the economies of scale benefit from a central point of control.
- Notifying the Product Owner/Manager and the security engineer of new security vulnerabilities, assisting in the development of remediation plans, and draft/publish communication of a fix or mitigation, including incident management.
┌────────────────────┐
┌────────►Vulnerability Report│
│ └─────────┬──────────┘
│ │
│ ┌──▼───┐
│ │Triage│
│ └──┬───┘
│ │
│ ┌──────▼───────┐ No ┌──────────────┐
│ │Is Vulnerable?├─────────►Issue Negative│
│ └──────┬───────┘ │ Response │
│ │ Yes └──────────────┘
│ │
│ ┌────▼─────┐ Yes ┌──────────────┐
│ │Data Leak?├───────────►Report to DPO │
│ └────┬─────┘ └─────┬────────┘
│ │ No │
│ ◄───────────────────────┘
│ │
│ ┌────▼─────┐ Yes ┌──────────────────────────┐
│ │ Public? ├──────────►Publish Security Advisory │
│ └────┬─────┘ └─────────┬────────────────┘
│ │ No │
│ │ │
┌────┴─────┐ ┌─────▼───────┐ │
│Search For◄──────┤ Development ◄──────────────────┘
│Similar │ │ Planning ├───────────┐
└──────────┘ └─────┬───────┘ │
│ │
│ │
│ │
┌────▼─────┐ ┌────▼────┐
│ Mitigate │ │Reproduce│
└────┬─────┘ └────┬────┘
│ │
┌──▼───┐ │
│ CI ◄───────────────┘
└──┬───┘
│
┌───▼─────┐
│ Release │
└───┬─────┘
│
┌───────────▼───────────────┐
│ Publish Security Advisory │
└───────────────────────────┘
Reports can arrive at the PSIRT via a number of channels
- via [email protected]
- from automation which tracks CVEs in third-party dependencies
- from regular third-party penetration tests
- from regular internal penetration tests
- from product teams
When a vulnerability is reported, an acknowledgement of receipt is sent within 24 hours. The team may respond with clarifying questions.
The Mirantis PSIRT uses CVSSv3.1 to score vulnerabilities. The following qualitative severity ratings are used
CVSSv3.1 Score | Qualitative Severity Rating |
---|---|
0.0 | None |
0.1 - 3.9 | Low |
4.0 - 6.9 | Medium |
7.0 - 8.9 | High |
9.0 - 10.0 | Critical |
The PSIRT uses the qualitative security rating to set targets for turnaround of issues.
Mirantis is ISO 27001 certified and as such has policies and procedures in place for the protection of customer and corporate data. If customer or corporate data is leaked by a vulnerability, this will be reported to the Data Protection Officer.
The Mirantis PSIRT organizes a development team response to a vulnerability. The PSIRT identifies the key people required to mitigate the vulnerability.
The Mirantis PSIRT works with development teams to reproduce the vulnerability if possible. Some classes of vulnerability may be theoretical e.g. cryptographic problems but have a clear path to mitigation and this step may be skipped. For others, it is essential to create test cases which reproduce the problem so that tests for mitigations can be added to Continuous Integration tests (CI).
The vulnerability may be the result of a systematic problem. For example, a development group may be using a technology in the wrong way repeatedly due to misunderstanding, gaps in developer education or simply that a new class of vulnerability has become apparent.
To address this, the PSIRT will search for similar vulnerabilities or vulnerability patterns and report findings in the normal vulnerability reporting process. The PSIRT may choose to short-circuit this process and add the new findings to the current vulnerability report.
Mirantis PSIRT will work with development teams to find mitigations. These can be
- workarounds
- improved deployment advice
- runtime changes to a deployed system
- code modifications
Once any mitigations have been successfully applied, a product release will be scheduled using the normal development mechanisms. Once the release is public, the PSIRT will publish a security advisory.
Mirantis PSIRT will publish security vulnerabilities
- in this github repository
- in software release notes
- security bulletins
The PSIRT may opt to co-ordinate disclosure with other parties when the vulnerability impacts multiple vendors.