google / google/osv.dev

Request OSS-Fuzz project owner approval before importing OSS-Fuzz reports

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oss-fuzz
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Description

Automating vulnerability reports from OSS-Fuzz is great, but the unfortunate fact is that OSS-Fuzz is very noisy. It's quite frequent that infrastructure changes cause false positives (see https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz/issues/11881).

Prior to OSV, this was fine because false positive reports could simply be ignored, and then OSS-Fuzz will automatically close them later. Fuzzing is super valuable, so we were more than happy to tolerate a moderate false positive rate, in exchange for avoiding false negatives, **provided that false positives were low cost**.

OSV completely throws this equation off. As soon as a bad report is imported into OSV, a ton of busywork is triggered downstream. The more OSV is used, the worse this will become. See, for example, https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz-vulns/pull/37 where every imported report was incorrect.

Fuzzers are incredibly valuable, and we do not want to be forced to shut off fuzzers because OSS-Fuzz's false vs true positive tradeoffs are no longer viable.

I think the most natural fix here is that, prior to importing from OSS-Fuzz, OSV should ping the project owners and provide an automated way for project owners to modify the imported report. If the maintainers don't respond after a short period of time, it can import automatically. But maintainers who are active *need* to have some way to deal with this noise, or we'll have to stop fuzzing.

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