Re: Shellshock timeline

[Stephane Chazelas <stephane.chazelas () gmail com>]

2014-10-03 15:28:31 -0400, David A. Wheeler:
> FYI, I've created a timeline of major Shellshock events here:
>
>   http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/shellshock.html#timeline
>
> If anyone has corrections or key additions, let me know.
[...]

About the discovery.

I discovered it in the morning (UK) of 2014-09-12 and reported
it at Fri, 12 Sep 2014 16:10:35 +0100 to Chet, and the security
contacts of Debian, Red Hat, Ubuntu and Mandriva (SUSE added
later) including details of the bug and the SSH and HTTP (Apache
header) vectors and mitigation and a bit fat warning that it was
very serious and not to be disclosed.

First patch by Chet at 2014-09-12 16:32:17 -0400, but was easily
bypassed. Ensued a discussion on that original list, several
patch iterations, whether or not to harden at this point and how,
whether or not to output error messages on parsing error,
additional vectors, scope, detection methods (IDS...), other
affected shells, local privilege escalation?, whether
localisation can bypass the fix, the impact of two env vars with
the same name, backward compatibility, who to contact early...
Of course, I have no visibility of what was discussed internally
at Red Hat/Ubuntu/Mandriva...

I suggested the name "bashdoor" on that list on Sun, 14 Sep 2014
14:29:48 +0100.

A release schedule with public disclosure on the 24th at
14:00 UTC and early notification to other unix and linux
vendors on the 22nd and select infrastructure provider
notification (such as CDNs including Microsoft) on the 23rd
proposed on the 16th by Florian.

Chet had patches for the final (before disclosure) fix for the
current and all past versions of bash up to 3.0 by 2014-09-16
22:00:02 -0400  (from diff dates)

I was out of the loop after the 19th

bashdoor.com was registered (not by me) with a creation date of
2014-09-24 13:59 UTC sometime before 2014-09-24 06:59:10Z
according to whois. Florian also said here that someone brought
the early notification sent to vendors/infrastructure to the
press, so someone obviously intended to take it to the press. I
don't know whom.

To answer the other post. The feature was definitely not in 1.05
nor 1.12 (the source of which can be found on the web), but was
in 1.13.5. Chet confirmed (to me and news outlets) that it was
added in 1.13.

Cheers,
Stephane