[This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.]
When referencing vulnerabilities in your products, you have a habit of only using an internal tracking number that is kept confidential between the reporter (e.g. ICS-CERT, ZDI) and you. For example, from your HotFix page (that requires registration):
WI2815: Directory Traversal Buffer overflow. Provided and/or discovered by: ICS-CERT ticket number ICS-VU-579709 created by Anthony …
The ICS-CERT ticket number is assigned as an internal tracking ID while the relevant parties figure out how to resolve the issue. Ultimately, that ticket number is not published by ICS-CERT. I have already sent a mail to them suggesting they include it in advisories moving forward, to help third parties match up vulnerabilities to fixes to initial reports. Instead of using that, you should use the public ICS-CERT advisory ID. The details you provide there are not specific enough to know which issue this corresponds to.
In another example:
WI2146: Improved the Remote Agent utility (CEServer.exe) to implement authentication between the development application and the target system, to ensure secure downloading, running, and stopping of projects. Also addressed problems with buffer overrun when downloading large files. Credits: ZDI reports ZDI-CAN-1181 and ZDI-CAN-1183 created by Luigi Auriemma
In this case, these likely correspond to OSVDB 77178 and 77179, but it would be nice to know that for sure. Further, we’d like to associate those internal tracking numbers to the entries but vendors do not reliably put them in order, so we don’t know if ZDI-CAN-1181 corresponds to the first or second.
In another:
WI1944: ISSymbol Virtual Machine buffer overflow Provided and/or discovered by: ZDI report ZDI-CAN-1341 and ZDI-CAN-1342
In this case, you give two ZDI tracking identifiers, but only mention a single vulnerability. ZDI has a history of abstracting issues very well. The presence of two identifiers, to us, means there are two distinct vulnerabilities.
This is one of the primary reasons CVE exists, and why ZDI, ICS-CERT, and most vendors now use it. In most cases, these larger reporting bodies will have a CVE number to share with you during the process, or if not, will have one at the time of disclosure.
Like your customers do, we appreciate clear information regarding vulnerabilities. Many large organizations will use a central clearing house like ours for vulnerability alerting, rather than trying to monitor hundreds of vendor pages. Helping us to understand your security patches in turn helps your customers.
Finally, adding a date the patch was made available will help to clarify these issues and give another piece of information that is helpful to organizations.
Thank you for your consideration in improving your process!