[cipherboy]

I'll bite ;-) Appreciate your replies as always tptacek!

It is a fair criticism. But I think two things give us an advantage here:

1. IBM started this fork and later bought HashiCorp, with the acquisition having fully completed. I've broached the subject with both sides post-acquisition but got only a negative response from the HashiCorp side and no response from IBM. We are very much a known entity to the teams that matter inside IBM. And I'd posit within HashiCorp as well given I came out of their Vault Crypto team. ;-)

Whether IBM wishes to cooperate is a different matter. Mentioning again, publicly, doesn't hurt and hopefully raises awareness to researchers (such as yourself!).

2. The Linux Foundation's OpenSSF (our umbrella foundation) has a reputation which we try our best to uphold. Obviously they'd be rightfully upset if we shared pre-disclosure vulnerabilities widely. So we won't and don't. Certainly the broader Linux distribution security list is a positive model in this regard.

If this were J. Doe's pet fork of $CRITICAL_SOFTWARE, 100% agree. But the fork is neither new nor lacking in reputation of its component/parent entities, so I'd hope researchers give us the same consideration they would any other of LF's forks (Valkey, OpenSearch, OpenTofu, ...).

But that said, I've personally disclosed vulnerabilities post-fork to HashiCorp and have mentioned to them that I have stopped future disclosures without a further agreement. This just leads to a two-party zero-day vulnerability race, which is not in anyone's best interest.

[tptacek]

These are all points well taken. I'd just say, don't look for any kind of coherent fairness in vulnerability embargo lists. Certainly, if you're a fork that the upstream doesn't want to exist, I don't think there's any norm that you'll automatically be included. I'm irritated about a number of embargo lists myself, but if the vulnerability researchers wanted to include me, they could, regardless of what IBM thought.