Security is the number one priority for cert-manager. If you think you've found a security vulnerability in a cert-manager project, you're in the right place.
Our reporting procedure is a work-in-progress, and will evolve over time. We welcome advice, feedback and pull requests for improving our security reporting processes.
When we say "a security vulnerability in cert-manager" we mean a security issue in any repository under the cert-manger GitHub organization.
This reporting process is intended only for security issues in the cert-manager project itself, and doesn't apply to applications using cert-manager or to issues which do not affect security.
Broadly speaking, if the issue cannot be fixed by a change to one of the covered repositories above, then it might not be appropriate to use this reporting mechanism and a GitHub issue in the appropriate repo or a question in Slack might be a better choice.
All that said, if you're unsure please reach out using this process before raising your issue through another channel. We'd rather err on the side of caution!
We do not accept reports which amount to copy and pasted output from a vulnerability scanning tool unless work has specifically been done to confirm that a vulnerability reported by the tool actually exists in cert-manager or a cert-manager subproject.
We make use of these tools ourselves and try to act on the output they produce; they can be useful! We tend to find, however, that when these reports are sent to our security mailing list they almost always represent false positives, since these tools tend to check for the presence of a library without considering how the library is used in context.
If we receive a report which seems to simply be a vulnerability list from a scanner we reserve the right to ignore it.
This applies especially when tools produce vulnerability identifiers which are not publicly visible or which are proprietary in some way. We can look up CVEs or other publicly-available identifiers for further details, but cannot do the same for proprietary identifiers.
The people who should have access to read your security report are listed in maintainers.csv.
- Describe the issue in English, ideally with some example configuration or code which allows the issue to be reproduced. Explain why you believe this to be a security issue in cert-manager, if that's not obvious.
- Put that information into an email. Use a descriptive title.
- Send the email to
cert-manager-security@googlegroups.com
Response times could be affected by weekends, holidays, breaks or time zone differences. That said, the security response team will endeavour to reply as soon as possible, ideally within 3 working days.
If the team concludes that the reported issue is indeed a security vulnerability in a cert-manager project, at least two members of the security response team will discuss the next steps together as soon as possible, ideally within 24 hours.
As soon as the team decides that the report is of a genuine vulnerability, one of the team will respond to the reporter acknowledging the issue and establishing a disclosure timeline, which should be as soon as possible.