Security Issues

Reporting a Security Issue

If you think that you have found a security issue in Symfony, don't use the bug tracker and don't publish it publicly. Instead, all security issues must be sent to security [at] symfony.com. Emails sent to this address are forwarded to the Symfony core team private mailing-list.

The following issues are not considered security issues and should be handled as regular bug fixes (if you have any doubts, don't hesitate to send us an email for confirmation):

• Any security issues found in debug tools that must never be enabled in production (including the web profiler or anything enabled when APP_DEBUG is set to true or APP_ENV set to anything but prod);
• Any security issues found in classes provided to help for testing that should never be used in production (like for instance mock classes that contain Mock in their name or classes in the Test namespace);
• Any fix that can be classified as security hardening like route enumeration, login throttling bypasses, denial of service attacks, timing attacks, or lack of SensitiveParameter attributes.

In any case, the core team has the final decision on which issues are considered security vulnerabilities.

Security Bug Bounties

Symfony is an Open-Source project where most of the work is done by volunteers. We appreciate that developers are trying to find security issues in Symfony and report them responsibly, but we are currently unable to pay bug bounties.

Resolving Process

For each report, we first try to confirm the vulnerability. When it is confirmed, the core team works on a solution following these steps:

1. Send an acknowledgment to the reporter;
2. Work on a patch;
3. Get a CVE identifier from mitre.org;

4. Write a security announcement for the official Symfony blog about the vulnerability. This post should contain the following information:

   • a title that always include the "Security release" string;
   • a description of the vulnerability;
   • the affected versions;
   • the possible exploits;
   • how to patch/upgrade/workaround affected applications;
   • the CVE identifier;
   • credits.
5. Send the patch and the announcement to the reporter for review;
6. Apply the patch to all maintained versions of Symfony;
7. Package new versions for all affected versions;
8. Publish the post on the official Symfony blog (it must also be added to the "`Security Advisories`_" category);
9. Update the public security advisories database maintained by the FriendsOfPHP organization and which is used by the check:security command.

Collaborating with Downstream Open-Source Projects

As Symfony is used by many large Open-Source projects, we standardized the way the Symfony security team collaborates on security issues with downstream projects. The process works as follows:

1. After the Symfony security team has acknowledged a security issue, it immediately sends an email to the downstream project security teams to inform them of the issue;
2. The Symfony security team creates a private Git repository to ease the collaboration on the issue and access to this repository is given to the Symfony security team, to the Symfony contributors that are impacted by the issue, and to one representative of each downstream projects;
3. All people with access to the private repository work on a solution to solve the issue via pull requests, code reviews, and comments;
4. Once the fix is found, all involved projects collaborate to find the best date for a joint release (there is no guarantee that all releases will be at the same time but we will try hard to make them at about the same time). When the issue is not known to be exploited in the wild, a period of two weeks is considered a reasonable amount of time.

The list of downstream projects participating in this process is kept as small as possible in order to better manage the flow of confidential information prior to disclosure. As such, projects are included at the sole discretion of the Symfony security team.

As of today, the following projects have validated this process and are part of the downstream projects included in this process:

• Drupal (releases typically happen on Wednesdays)
• eZPublish

Issue Severity

In order to determine the severity of a security issue we take into account the complexity of any potential attack, the impact of the vulnerability and also how many projects it is likely to affect. This score out of 15 is then converted into a level of: Low, Medium, High, Critical, or Exceptional.

Security Advisories

Check the Security Advisories blog category for a list of all security vulnerabilities that were fixed in Symfony releases, starting from Symfony 1.0.0.