Bitcoin Core Devs Critical Bug Policy: Improving Bug Management

Implementing Bitcoin Core Devs Critical Bug Policy

A group of developers working on Bitcoin Core has introduced a disclosure strategy for “critical bugs” with the goal of better communicating security flaws in the cryptocurrency. Antoine Poinsot, a core developer of Bitcoin, and five other people wrote to members of the Bitcoin Development Mailing List on July 3 stating that the project has a history of failing to adequately disclose security-critical issues, whether they are discovered by contributors or reported externally. Because of this, there is a misconception among Bitcoin users that Bitcoin Core is error-free. However, Poinsot emphasized that this is untrue.

Four Severity Levels Determined for Security Vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities will be categorized into four severity levels under the new disclosure policy.

• The first category, “low,” contains minimal effect and makes it difficult to exploit defects, like wallet bugs that need to be accessed on the machine used by the victim.
• Bugs with a modest impact, such as local network remote crashes, fall into the second category, “medium.”
• The remaining two categories comprise “high” severity defects that have the potential to cause major effects, while “critical” severity bugs pose a threat to the integrity of the entire network.

Making the security bugs available to the wider group of contributors can help prevent future ones.

Poinsot

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