Red Hat's open approach to vulnerability management

Security is at the top of mind for our customers, and understanding the language and practices around security is vital for teams delivering applications and managing infrastructure. Understanding how Red Hat reports and evaluates security vulnerabilities — as well as the tools Red Hat uses to communicate and address vulnerabilities — goes a long way towards protecting your IT environment. 

In addition, learning why Red Hat utilizes an open methodology to vulnerability management is equally important. Red Hat doesn’t just produce enterprise open source software; from start to finish we do so with transparency and accountability. We believe this is critical for customers and communities to fully understand the vulnerabilities that may impact them, as well as provide the data necessary to make appropriate, informed decisions.

You'll find a great deal of information on vulnerabilities that affect open source software that makes up Red Hat's products, but what we provide often differs from the upstream software. Since vulnerability analysis on upstream software may not apply to the products you use today, we provide authoritative information about our products that can help inform your practices and response.  

We communicate about our policies and practices frequently, through posts on the Red Hat Blog, through advisories and in articles on the Red Hat Customer Portal, sessions at Red Hat Summit and more. 

Bringing it all together

We'll continue to write and speak about these topics, but we wanted to give our customers and communities a single document as a convenient reference to better understand how we categorize, address and respond to security vulnerabilities.

In "An Open Approach to Vulnerability Management" you can learn:

• How Red Hat reports and evaluates vulnerabilities using Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE), and the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) standards.

• How our Severity Ratings system works and when a vulnerability poses a severe and immediate threat to your environment and when a vulnerability is unlikely to impact your environment.

• How Red Hat's product support life cycle informs our response to security issues.

• How Red Hat uses backporting and rebasing to address vulnerabilities. 

• What content signing is, and how to use it to verify software is from Red Hat, and untampered with.

Grab An Open Approach to Vulnerability Management today

There's plenty more to learn about Red Hat’s methodology of understanding and addressing security vulnerabilities. Get your copy of An Open Approach to Vulnerability Managements today and be sure to follow the Security channel here on the Red Hat Blog.