- The developer of the ‘node-ip’ project made the GitHub repository read-only after disputing the severity of a reported vulnerability (CVE-2023-42282).
- The vulnerability involved incorrect identification of private IP addresses in non-standard formats, but the developer argued it had a dubious security impact.
- The situation highlights ongoing issues with unverified CVE reports causing unnecessary panic and frustration for open-source project maintainers.
The library hadn’t had any updates in 2 years before this. Clearly it wasn’t maintained. If you’re a user and bothered by this super edge case “vulnerability”, fork it and take on the responsibility yourself.
Clearly it wasn’t maintained.
Lol. It’s an IP library. IP classifications haven’t changed. What could he possibly update?
There’s a whole bunch of pull requests and issues sitting there for a start.
Personally I’d also update the example in the readme and set an engine value in the package.json file.
Then fork it and do that.
These projects are structured as hobbyist projects and get whatever time the maintainer can spare. I have projects like that, they’re useful, but I’m not gonna prioritize them over… anything else, come to think of it.
The fact so many people treat a hobbyist project with one maintainer as critical infrastructure is insane, but that’s on them. Everybody likes free software, nobody likes to help or pay the maintainer.
I do feel like we may have hit a time where the groups classifying CVEs are a bit desperate for numbers. It’s really hard to tell the legitimate ones from the ones where it’s like “If you had tiny gremlins with soldering irons living inside your PC, its possible they might be able to determine what year your computer thinks it is. The gremlins are assumed to have full domain admin access”.
