Open Source Vulnerability Database

The Open Sourced Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) was an independent and open-sourced vulnerability database. The goal of the project was to provide accurate, detailed, current, and unbiased technical information on security vulnerabilities.[1] The project promoted greater and more open collaboration between companies and individuals. The database's motto was "Everything is Vulnerable"[2].

The core of OSVDB was a relational database which tied various information about security vulnerabilities into a common, cross-referenced open security data source. As of December 2013, the database cataloged over 100,000 vulnerabilities.[3] While the database was maintained by a 501(c)(3) non-profit public organization and volunteers, the data was prohibited for commercial use without a license. Despite that, many large commercial companies used the data in violation of the license without contributing employee volunteer time or financial compensation.[4]

History

The project was started in August 2002 at the Blackhat and DEF CON Conferences by several industry notables (including H. D. Moore, rain.forest.puppy, and others). Under mostly-new management, the database officially launched to the public on March 31, 2004.[5] The original implementation was written in PHP by Forrest Rae (FBR). Later, the entire site was re-written in Ruby on Rails by David Shettler.

The Open Security Foundation (OSF) was created to ensure the project's continuing support. Jake Kouns (Zel), Chris Sullo, Kelly Todd (AKA Lyger), David Shettler (AKA D2D), and Brian Martin (AKA Jericho) were project leaders for the OSVDB project, and held leadership roles in the OSF at various times.

On 5 April 2016, the database was shut down, while the blog was initially continued by Brian Martin.[6] The reason for the shut down was the ongoing commercial but uncompensated use by security companies.[7]

As of January 2012, vulnerability entry was performed by full-time employees of Risk Based Security [8], who provided the personnel to do the work in order to give back to the community. Every new entry included a full title, disclosure timeline, description, solution (if known), classification metadata, references, products, and researcher who discovered the vulnerability (creditee).

Process

Originally, vulnerability disclosures posted in various security lists and web sites were entered into the database as a new entry in the New Data Mangler (NDM) queue. The new entry contained only a title and links to the disclosure. At that stage the page for the new entry didn't contain any detailed description of the vulnerability or any associated metadata. As time permitted, new entries were analyzed and refined, by adding a description of the vulnerability as well as a solution if available. This general activity was called "data mangling" and someone who performed this task a "mangler". Mangling was done by core or casual volunteers. Details submitted by volunteers were reviewed by the core volunteers, called "moderators", further refining the entry or rejecting the volunteer changes if necessary. New information added to an entry that was approved was then available to anyone browsing the site.

Contributors

Some of the people that volunteered and maintained OSVDB:

  • Jake Kouns (Officer of OSF, Moderator)
  • Chris Sullo (Officer of OSF, Moderator)
  • Brian Martin (Officer of OSF, Moderator)
  • Kelly Todd (Officer of OSF, Moderator)
  • David Shettler (Officer of OSF, Developer)
  • Forrest Rae (Developer)

Other volunteers who have helped in the past include:

  • Steve Tornio (Moderator)
  • Alexander Koren (Mangler)
  • Travis Schack (Mangler)
  • Susam Pal (Mangler)
  • Christian Seifert (Mangler)
  • Zain Memon
gollark: But my computer has a 64-bit address space.
gollark: I want my pointers to occupy the entire address space.
gollark: Doesn't `rand()` return values up to some smallish constant?
gollark: Only Turing and later have good enough on-chip processors to use it, apparently.
gollark: nvidia-open is quite funny, since they just moved all of the proprietary stuff to a giant tens-of-megabytes firmware blob.

References
  1. Rosencrance, Linda (16 April 2004). "Brief: Vulnerability database goes live". Computerworld. Retrieved 15 August 2020.
  2. "Biased software vulnerability stats praising Microsoft were 101% misleading". Retrieved 20 May 2020.
  3. "We hit the 100,000 mark…". 20 January 2014. Retrieved 22 January 2020.
  4. "McAfee accused of McSlurping Open Source Vulnerability Database". www.theregister.com. Retrieved 15 August 2020.
  5. Gold, Jon (7 April 2016). "Open-source vulnerabilities database shuts down". Network World. Retrieved 22 January 2020.
  6. "OSVDB: Fin". 5 April 2016. Archived from the original on 28 May 2016. Retrieved 22 January 2020.
  7. Kovacs, Eduard. "McAfee Issues Response to OSVDB Accusations Regarding Data Scraping". softpedia. Retrieved 15 August 2020.
  8. "Homepage". RBS. Retrieved 15 August 2020.
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