Please report any security issue via Private Vulnerability Reporting where the issue will be triaged appropriately. Thank you in advance for helping to keep OpenTofu secure.

OpenTofu is a large growing community of volunteers, users, and vendors. The OpenTofu community has adopted this security disclosure and response policy to ensure we responsibly handle critical issues.

Security vulnerabilities should be handled quickly and sometimes privately. The primary goal of this process is to reduce the total time users are vulnerable to publicly known exploits.

The Product Security Team (PST) is responsible for organizing the entire response including internal communication and external disclosure but will need help from relevant developers to successfully run this process.

The initial Product Security Team will consist of members of Steering Committee and Core Development Team. In the future we may decide to have a subset of maintainers work on security response given that this process is time consuming.

The OpenTofu community asks that all suspected vulnerabilities be privately and responsibly disclosed via the reporting policy.

If you know of a publicly disclosed security vulnerability please IMMEDIATELY submit a report via Private Vulnerability Reporting to inform the Product Security Team (PST) about the vulnerability so they may start the patch, release, and communication process.

If possible the PST will ask the person making the public report if the issue can be handled via a private disclosure process (for example if the full exploit details have not yet been published). If the reporter denies the request for private disclosure, the PST will move swiftly with the fix and release process. In extreme cases GitHub can be asked to delete the issue but this generally isn't necessary and is unlikely to make a public disclosure less damaging.

For each vulnerability a member of the PST will volunteer to lead coordination with the "Fix Team" and is responsible for sending disclosure emails to the rest of the community. This lead will be referred to as the "Fix Lead."

The role of Fix Lead should rotate round-robin across the PST.

Note that given the current size of the OpenTofu community it is likely that the PST is the same as the "Fix team." (I.e., all maintainers). The PST may decide to bring in additional contributors for added expertise depending on the area of the code that contains the vulnerability.

The Fix Lead drives the schedule using their best judgment based on severity and development time. If the Fix Lead is dealing with a public disclosure all timelines become ASAP (assuming the vulnerability has a CVSS score >= 4). If the fix relies on another upstream project's disclosure timeline, that will adjust the process as well. We will work with the upstream project to fit their timeline and best protect our users.