- Note that this policy document is a work in progress.
- We will continue to update this policy document until Caliptra reaches the 1.0 milestone.

Security information about each release is included in the release notes of each of the Caliptra releases on GitHub.

A summary of the known security vulnerabilities for Caliptra ingredient repositories are listed at the links below:

Vulnerability notifications pre-release or during embargo periods are available to product creators that have registered for vulnerability alerts. Further details can be found in Embargo policy.

We’re extremely grateful for our silicon integrators, contributors and security researchers that report vulnerabilities to the Caliptra Project and raise its assurance bar.

If you believe you have found a security vulnerability in any Caliptra repository, please report it to us through coordinated disclosure.

Please do not report security vulnerabilities through public GitHub issues, discussions, or pull requests.

All reports are thoroughly investigated by the Caliptra Technical Committee (TC) members who form the Caliptra Project Security Incident Response Team (Caliptra PSIRT) and may get assigned a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures number (CVE) if appropriate.

The Caliptra project is a listed CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) with MITRE.

Vulnerabities can be reported by either of the following two approaches:

1. Using the "Report a Vulnerability" capability in GitHub for each repository directly OR
2. Using email: [email protected]. Reports may optionally be encrypted using the Caliptra Vulnerability Reports Public PGP Key.

More details of how vulnerabilities are handled can be found in the section Security vulnerability response.

• You think you discovered a potential security vulnerability in Caliptra.
• You are unsure how a vulnerability affects Caliptra.
• You think you discovered a vulnerability in another project that Caliptra depends upon.
  • For projects with their own vulnerability reporting and disclosure process, please report it directly there.

• You need help tuning Caliptra components for security.
  • Instead, file an Issue labeled as "feature request".
• You need help with a previously announced Caliptra Security Advisory.
  • Instead, file an Issue labeled as "question"".
• Your issue is not security related. Instead, file an issue as appropriate.

Issues can be filed at the following locations:

• Caliptra General Issues
• Caliptra RTL Issues
• Caliptra ROM or FW Issues
• Caliptra DPE Issues
• Caliptra U-Reg Issues

Each report is acknowledged by Caliptra Project Security Incident Response Team members within 2 working days. If the report is accepted, a CVE score is entered, and the issue is assigned to the Caliptra Technical Committee to begin further debug and analysis within 7 calendar days. This will trigger the Security incident management process outlined below.

Any vulnerability information shared with the Caliptra Technical Committee stays within the Caliptra project and will not be disseminated to other projects unless it is necessary to get the issue fixed.

As the security issue moves from triage, to identified fix, to release planning, we will keep the reporter updated.

The information members receive during embargo periods may be received from the Caliptra Vulnerability Alerts mailing list: [email protected]. To sign up, visit lists.chipsalliance.org/g/Vulnerability-Alerts.caliptra-wg. Any information regarding embargoed vulnerabilities must not be made public, shared, nor even hinted at anywhere beyond the need-to-know within your specific team except with the list’s explicit approval. This holds true until the public disclosure date/time that was agreed upon by the list. Members of the list and others may not use the information for anything other than getting the issue fixed for your respective product’s users.

Before any embargoed information from the list is shared with respective members of your team required to fix said issue, they must agree to the same terms and only find out information on a need-to-know basis.

In the unfortunate event that a member shares the information beyond what is allowed by this policy, that member must urgently inform the Caliptra workgroup at the [email protected] mailing list of exactly what information leaked and to whom. A retrospective will take place after the leak so we can assess how to not make the same mistake in the future.

If the member continues to leak information and break this policy, the member is removed from the list.

More details of how vulnerabilities are handled can be found in our Security incident management process section.

Companies or individuals building products that integrate Caliptra and are trademark recipients may be eligible to participate in the [email protected] mail list and receive advanced notification of the vulnerabilities and mitigations before public disclosure by applying to participate. For more information, refer to the Vulnerability notification process section of this document.

Criteria for participation includes:

1. Complete the to be defined Caliptra trademark license grant process to be recognized as a product integrator.
2. Register for Caliptra vulnerability alerts.
3. Have a contact who will respond to emails within a week and understands how Caliptra is being used in the product.
4. Have a publicly listed product based on some release of Caliptra.
5. Have an actively monitored security email alias.
6. Accept the Caliptra Embargo Policy that is outlined above.

Removal:

1. If a member stops adhering to these criteria after joining the list, then the member is unsubscribed.

Issues within this bug tracking system will transition through a number of states according to this diagram:

flowchart TB
    Triage -->|2 business days| Draft_New
    Triage --> Closed_Rejected
    Draft_New -->|7 calendar days| Draft_Assigned
    Draft_New <--> Closed_Rejected
    Draft_Assigned <--> Draft_Review
    Draft_Review ---> Closed_Rejected
    Draft_Review --> Draft_Accepted
    Draft_Accepted -->|90 calendar days <br> from initial report| Closed_Published

• Triage: This state represents new reports that have been entered directly by a reporter. The security team will triage these reports and move them to either Draft_New or Closed_Rejected. When reports are entered by the security team in response to an email, the issue shall be transitioned directly to Draft_New.

• Draft_New: This issue is awaiting disposition by the security team. The security team will analyze the issue, determine a responsible entity, assign it to that individual, and move the issue to the Draft_Assigned state. Part of triage is to set the issue’s priority.

• Draft_Assigned: The issue was assigned, a CVE score was entered, and the issue is awaiting a fix by the assignee. At this time, collaborators are designated, and a private fork of the affected repository is created. The original reporter of the vulnerability is included as a collaborator. Only collaborators are able to view details of the vulnerability and participate in discussions and code reviews until the final security advisory is published publicly.

• Draft_Review: Once there is a GitHub pull request (PR) for the issue, the PR link is added to a comment in the issue, and the issue moved to the Draft_Review state.

• Draft_Accepted: Indicates that this issue was merged into the appropriate public branch within Caliptra.

• Closed_Published: The embargo period has ended. The issue is made publicly visible, the associated CVE is updated, and the security advisories page in the repository is updated to include the detailed information.

• Closed_Rejected: The Caliptra PSIRT has rejected the reported security vulnerability. It may have been deemed a non-issue, or it may have been converted into a standard GitHub Issue report. The PSIRT may also re-open the issue from here.

The security advisories created are kept private, due to the sensitive nature of security reports. The issues are only visible to certain parties:

• Members of the PSIRT mailing list
• The reporter
• Others, as proposed and ratified by the Caliptra PSIRT. In the general case, this will include:
  • The code owner responsible for the fix.
  • The Caliptra release owners for the relevant releases affected by this vulnerability.

The Caliptra TC shall review the reported vulnerabilities during any meeting with more than three people in attendance. During this review, they shall determine if new issues need to be embargoed.

The guideline for embargo is based on:

1. Severity of the issue, and
2. Exploitability of the issue.

Issues that the Caliptra TC decides do not need an embargo are reproduced in the regular Caliptra project bug tracking system.

Security sensitive vulnerabilities shall be made public after an embargo period of at most 90 days. The intent is to allow 30 days within the Caliptra project to fix the issues, and 60 days for product creators building products using Caliptra to be able to apply and distribute these fixes.

Fixes to the code shall be made through PRs in the Caliptra project GitHub repositories. Developers must not reveal the sensitive nature of what is being fixed, and shall not refer to CVE numbers that have been assigned to the issue. The developer instead should describe what was fixed, without revealing how the issue was discovered or its possible impact.

The Caliptra TC shall maintain information that maps embargoed CVEs to these PRs (this information is within the Github security advisories), and produce regular reports of the state of security issues.

Each issue that is considered a security vulnerability shall be assigned a CVE number. As fixes are created, it may be necessary to allocate additional CVE numbers, or to retire numbers that were assigned.

Each Caliptra release shall contain a report of CVEs that were fixed in that release. Because of the sensitive nature of these vulnerabilities, the release shall merely include a list of CVEs that have been fixed. After the embargo period, the vulnerabilities page shall be updated to include additional details of these vulnerabilities. The vulnerability page shall give credit to the reporter(s) unless a reporter specifically requests anonymity.

The Caliptra project shall maintain a vulnerability-alerts mailing list. This list is seeded initially with a contact from each project member.

Additional parties can request to join this list by visiting lists.chipsalliance.org/g/Vulnerability-Alerts.caliptra-wg. These parties are vetted by the Caliptra PSIRT to determine that they have a legitimate interest in knowing about security vulnerabilities during the embargo period.

Periodically, the Caliptra PSIRT will send information to this mailing list describing known embargoed issues and their backport status within the project. This information is intended to allow them to determine if they need to backport these changes to any internal trees.

When issues have been triaged, this list is informed of:

• The Caliptra Project security advisory link (GitHub).
• The CVE number assigned.
• The subsystem involved.
• The severity of the issue.

After acceptance of a PR fixing the issue (merged), in addition to the above, the list is informed of:

• The association between the CVE number and the PR fixing it.
• Backport plans within the Caliptra project.

Each security issue fixed within Caliptra Firmware shall be backported to the following releases:

• The current Long Term Stable (LTS) release.
• The most recent two releases.

Backports are tracked in the security advisory and are completed during the 90 day embargo period.

Due to the sensitive nature of security vulnerabilities, it is important to share details and fixes only with those parties that have a need to know. The following parties will need to know details about security vulnerabilities before the embargo period ends:

• Maintainers will have access to all information within their domain area only.
• The current release manager, and the release manager for historical releases affected by the vulnerability (see backporting above).
• The Project Security Incident Response Team will have full access to information.
• The PSIRT is made up of representatives from Caliptra integrators and contributors.
• As needed, release managers and maintainers may be invited to attend additional security meetings to discuss vulnerabilities.