breadcrumbs: Chromium Security > page_name: security-release-management title: Security Release Management
Engineers outside the Chrome Security team shouldn’t request merges for security fixes. Instead, please mark the bug as Fixed and we’ll take care of it. The instructions below are for the Chrome Security team itself.
Security fixes often need to be merged to the Stable or Beta branch. One of the key considerations in picking a fix to merge is assessing the risk of breakage, which the bug’s owner should be able to convey. For risky fixes you should consider bumping it to a later milestone. Generally, you should consider merging the following:
For Critical and High bugs, we aim to fix users fast and work directly with Chrome TPMs to make sure any merge or release is done safely. The following are general recommendations on when / where to merge:
Other factors to consider in your merge vs. no-merge calculation are:
Your worklist for merges is defined by the following bug database criteria:
(Note: beware of querying on the milestone. At this stage in the bug‘s life, the milestone label represents the earliest affected release at the time the bug was filed. So if current stable is M27, there might still be bugs in this list which are M25, M26, etc., if we’ve been a little slow in fixing them. Conversely, anything marked M28 denotes a regression since M27 stable, so it only needs to be merged to the M28 beta.)
When a security merge has been approved, please go ahead and merge.
To avoid accidentally losing a fix for a Chrome release, branch merges should be done in a “newer first” manner. For example, if you're merging a fix to M27 stable and M28 is branched and affected, then merge to M28 first. Such a strategy can also be used to bake a fix on the M28 branch in order to gain confidence about an M27 stable channel merge.
You should merge fixes with gerrit, which automates most of the process. If the gerrit merge does not apply cleanly you may want to reconsider whether the fix will introduce an unacceptable breakage risk. In the event that you can’t use gerrit to merge a fix, you still have the option of manually merging from a branch checkout. This follows the normal developer normal patch process.
Once the fix is successfully merged you will need to:
Release Notes
For every new release, we include notes from security bugs that match the following search criteria:
For example, this link shows the security fixes that went into the initial Beta -> Stable promotion of Chrome 26, and this link shows the security fixes that went into the first post-stable patch of the Chrome 24 branch.
Every externally reported issue gets assigned a CVE ID per MITRE‘s CVE Counting Rules. Chrome’s CVE pool is here (Google internal-only link, sorry). As of Chrome 27, we're focusing the release notes on externally reported issues. This mirrors how Mozilla Firefox arranges their release notes, saves the precious resource of CVEs, saves a lot of time in preparing release notes, and appropriately focuses our security release notes on the excellent contributions and rewards of external researchers.
CVEs are allocated when the stable release that contains the fix is released, and they are then placed into the bug tracker using the CVE label, and copied into the release notes. An example of how it looks is here for the Chrome 27 release notes.
There is no longer any need to pre-notify security-notify@chromium.org with a copy of release notes. Very few list members were finding it useful or actionable.