This page contains a very basic summary of the approved EGI Software Vulnerability Issue Handling Process  

Reporting an issue

Anyone may report an issue - by e-mail to

report-vulnerability (at) egi.eu

Investigation of an issue

If it has not been announced, SVG contacts the software provider and the software provider investigates (with SVG members, reporter, others, as is relevant.)

The relevance and effect in EGI are determined.

Risk Assessment

A Risk Assessment is then carried out by the RAT for all valid issues which are relevant to EGI, where the issue is placed in 1 of 4 risk categories

  • Critical
  • High
  • Moderate
  • Low

Notes On Risk

Target Date Set

If the issue had not been fixed, the target date for resolution is set to a fixed value for each risk category

  • Critical - special procedure according to circumstances
  • High - 6 weeks
  • Moderate - 4 months
  • Low - 1 year

This allows the prioritisation of fixing of issues, according to how serious they are. This is mainly relevant to software produced by members of EGI and those collaborating with EGI.

Note that this is only applies to vulnerabilities in software which is written by those we collaborate with, such as that in the UMD.

Fixing the problem

It is then up to the developers and software distributers to ensure the vulnerability is eliminated from the software available to the EGI infrastructure in time for the Target Date.

Advisory issued

Advisory is issued by SVG

  • When the vulnerability is fixed if EGI SVG is the main handler of vulnerabilities for this software, or software is in EGI Repository regardless of the risk. If the issue is not fixed by the target date, an advisory will normally be issued anyway, this is known as 'responsible disclosure'.
  • If the issue is ‘Critical’ or ‘High’ in the EGI infrastructure
  • If we think there is a good reason to issue an advisory to the sites.

The Deployment Expert Group

The EGI infrastructure has become less homogenous in recent years, and more and more software is not in-house and the SVG risk assessment team know less and less about the various software which is deployed. The Software Security Checklist is designed to help those selecting and deploying software choose software which is secure and well maintained and deploy it in a secure manner. Now we ask those who select and deploy software to help with the vulnerability handling of the software they choose, so we can maintain our high standards of software vulnerability handing in the increasing inhomogeneous environment. We therefore invite people to join the Deployment Expert Group or DEG, to help us handle vulnerabilities in Software deployed across the evolving infrastructure.