LLVM security group and 2021 security transparency report

Over the past few years, the LLVM project has seen the creation of a security group, which aims to enable responsible disclosure and fixing of security-related issues affecting the LLVM project.

The LLVM security group was established on the 10th of July 2020 by the act of the initial commit describing the purpose of the group and the processes it follows. Many of the group’s processes were still not well-defined enough for the group to operate well. Over the course of 2021, the key processes were defined well enough to enable the group to operate reasonably well:

We defined details on how to report security issues, see this commit on 20th of May 2021.
We refined the nomination process for new group members, see this commit on 30th of July 2021.
We wrote a first annual transparency report, which is published at https://llvm.org/docs/SecurityTransparencyReports.html There is a copy of the 2021 transparency report below.

Over the course of 2021, we had 2 people leave the LLVM Security group and 4 people join.

In 2021, the security group received 13 issue reports that were made publicly visible before 31st of December 2021. The security group judged 2 of these reports to be security issues:

Both issues were addressed with source changes: #5 in clangd/vscode-clangd, and #11 in llvm-project. No dedicated LLVM release was made for either.

We believe that with the publishing of the first annual transparency report, the security group now has implemented all necessary processes for the group to operate as promised. The group’s processes can be improved further, and we do expect further improvements to get implemented in 2022. Many of the potential improvements end up being discussed on the monthly public call on LLVM’s security group.