Security

Being a network client which interacts with untrusted users and servers, managing vulnerabilities and security response is important to the Pidgin project and to our users. We have established procedures for collecting security-related information, and for disclosing this information to the public.

Please see our comprehensive list of known and reported security advisories for information on past vulnerabilities.

Reporting a Security-related Issue

If you believe you have discovered a security problem or vulnerability in Pidgin, libpurple, Finch, or one of our related projects, please let us know by using one of the following methods:

• Our preferred way: Emailing security@pidgin.im. If you choose this method and would like to encrypt the contents of your email, you may use the pgp key of our lead developer.
• Use this specific new issue link, which will create a new issue in our issue tracker while ensuring that its visibility is set so that it’s only visible to the Pidgin Developers team. The visibility selection we are referring to can be verified by looking for it right above the Create button. Setting a limited visibility is of utmost importance as otherwise we’d need to consider the vulnerability to have been made public since everyone could read it from our issue tracker.

In order to help us fix the problem as quickly as possible and with as little exposure to malicious intent to our users as can be managed, we ask that you give us a chance to fix the problem before you publish its existence or details in a public forum, and that you provide us with as much information as you can. In return, we will endeavor to respond to your concerns in a timely fashion. When reporting a security-related bug or a vulnerability, please provide us with as much of the information in the following list as possible. If you don’t know what something is or how to provide it, that’s OK, leave it out and tell us what you do know.

• A way to contact you or your organization.
• The version of Pidgin, libpurple, Finch, or other package in which the problem was discovered.
• A concise description of the problem, including a summary of why you believe it is security-critical. This might be, for example, “Receipt of an invalid XMPP message containing the tag <foo>; causes Pidgin to write data to an invalid memory location.”
• Steps to reproduce the problem, if known.
• Any debugging information, including backtraces (see our instructions for obtaining a backtrace, a debug log (the output of pidgin --debug), etc.
• Any proof of concept exploits, debugging tools, or other information you have and are willing to divulge.
• The oldest and newest versions of our software affected by the bug to the best of your knowledge. If you don’t know, that’s fine — we’ll try to find out.
• Information on any security reports or vulnerability assessments you may have already made on the issue (preferably not yet public, as mentioned above).
• Any proposed embargo dates, release schedules, etc. you or your organization may have established.

Receiving Security-related Reports

We maintain a list of packagers and maintainers of Pidgin and related software which we notify of security vulnerabilities and their fixes prior to disclosure to the public. This allows packagers and distributors of our software to release patched or updated versions simultaneously with the public disclosure of known issues. We attempt to provide sufficient advance warning to this list that packages may be properly prepared before disclosure.

If you believe you should be on this list, please contact security@pidgin.im and let us know why.