- The developer of the ‘node-ip’ project made the GitHub repository read-only after disputing the severity of a reported vulnerability (CVE-2023-42282).
- The vulnerability involved incorrect identification of private IP addresses in non-standard formats, but the developer argued it had a dubious security impact.
- The situation highlights ongoing issues with unverified CVE reports causing unnecessary panic and frustration for open-source project maintainers.
I do feel like we may have hit a time where the groups classifying CVEs are a bit desperate for numbers. It’s really hard to tell the legitimate ones from the ones where it’s like “If you had tiny gremlins with soldering irons living inside your PC, its possible they might be able to determine what year your computer thinks it is. The gremlins are assumed to have full domain admin access”.
The library hadn’t had any updates in 2 years before this. Clearly it wasn’t maintained. If you’re a user and bothered by this super edge case “vulnerability”, fork it and take on the responsibility yourself.
“unchanged” isn’t “unmaintained”. Wow, that’s a really short-sighted take.
Clearly it wasn’t maintained.
Lol. It’s an IP library. IP classifications haven’t changed. What could he possibly update?
There’s a whole bunch of pull requests and issues sitting there for a start.
Personally I’d also update the example in the readme and set an engine value in the package.json file.
Then fork it and do that.
These projects are structured as hobbyist projects and get whatever time the maintainer can spare. I have projects like that, they’re useful, but I’m not gonna prioritize them over… anything else, come to think of it.
The fact so many people treat a hobbyist project with one maintainer as critical infrastructure is insane, but that’s on them. Everybody likes free software, nobody likes to help or pay the maintainer.
100%. I think the developer taking the project read only was not a temper tantrum, it was just them signifying they don’t have time to maintain it. So now if you want anything to happen you must fork it.
I find this outcome delightful for all the compliance mandated organizations that are leaching with no intention to contribute back.
It could be really helpful for developers at pure leech organizations to make a case for being ready to contribute in an agile manner.
Now they’re all stuck waiting on either a good Samaritan, or their lawyers to get out of the way of progress.
I have little doubt that the fix has been committed to private forks dozens of times already, of course.
This whole debacle is a festival of stupidity:
- It’s a personal project that taxes the sole maintainer disproportionately.
- Millions of idiots use it blindly and end up building elaborate software on it. https://xkcd.com/2347/
- I’ll bet you 99.99% of those idiots use it only for
ip.isPrivate(), which you can write yourself in 5 minutes. - The CVE is a non-issue (who the fuck would call a function that takes string notation with hex numbers?)
- Appealing and reverting or downgrading CVEs is super complicated.
At this point the maintainer is fucked no matter what they do, so archiving the project and telling everybody to fuck off right back was really the only sane thing to do.
