Debian struggling with security

Debian is facing difficulties getting timely security updates to users of its Linux distribution due to lack of manpower and software problems.

The issues recently surfaced when Debian released the latest version of its Linux distribution early in June, according to Martin Schulze, a member of the organisation's security team.

That release, Schulze wrote on his blog, caused configuration problems on the server which was responsible for distributing security updates -- and it hasn't been functioning properly since. "Several security updates aren't built on all architectures as they should be," the developer wrote only yesterday. "Currently, it's totally unreliable."

Lack of manpower also appears to be adding to Debian's security woes. Michael Stone, another member of Debian's security team, expressed his frustration to the organisation's security e-mail mailing list in mid-June, saying there was no effective tracking of security problems.

The problems have seen Debian fall behind competitors like Red Hat in releasing updates to widely-used programs. For example, although spam-filtering package SpamAssassin was updated by its creator to fix a remote denial-of-service vulnerability on 6 June, Debian provided the update on 1 July, while Novell's SuSE got the fix a week earlier on 23 June, Gentoo Linux on the 21st and Red Hat's Fedora still earlier on the 16th.

A similar situation occurred when the 'sudo' package needed an update in mid-June. In addition a number of security-related bugs are listed on Schulze's Web site as being unfixed, although the site also notes the data may be inaccurate as it is automatically generated.

Although Debian's infrastructure problems have not been as prominently discussed as the manpower issues on the project's mailing lists, giving some developers more authority is one idea that has been discussed as a way of speeding up the release of security updates.

As one developer put it: "The problem we're currently seeing isn't that the job is hard, but that only a very small number of people have the authority/ability to push the update out."

Another agreed, calling for the size of the security team to be increased from seven to 21.