[ubuntu-hardened] Making security notices searchable

Alex Murray alex.murray at canonical.com
Mon Oct 14 11:35:27 UTC 2019


Hey mpt,

On Sun, 2019-10-13 at 20:25:45 +1030, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:

> Hi folks
>
> On Canonical’s Web & Design team, I’m working on a project to design how
> the USN tracker <https://usn.ubuntu.com/> can become part of the main
> ubuntu.com site.

Awesome!

>
> This will have several benefits, including the tracker being easier to
> find, more obvious linking to and from other Ubuntu security info
> <https://ubuntu.com/security>, and staying in sync with the look of the
> rest of ubuntu.com.
>
> As part of this, I’m considering adding a search function, so that you
> can search security notices by Details text, with filters for Release
> and Package.

This sounds very neat.

>
> So, I’m interested in knowing:
>
> *   Is there any current method of searching USNs? (Other than using
>     “site:usn.ubuntu.com” with a global search engine, or grepping the
>     usn.ubuntu.com Git repo.)

The USNs are also available in a big json blob - this may or may not be
easier to search due to it's size - but from this you can search on the
"description" attribute for each USN object.

https://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-security/usn/database.json

>
> *   If any search showed results sorted newest first, would there be any
>     use case for searching notices by date? (For example, show me only
>     notices posted in 2017.)

I can imagine some folks might want this but this sounds more like a
nice-to-have feature than a must-have - I would assume most would want
to be able to sort based on which Release the USN applies to - so show
me all USNs which apply to bionic for apache2 etc.

>
> *   Anything else you think I should know?
>

Nothing off the top of my head but perhaps other folks might be able to
chime in with stuff I have missed :)

> Thanks
> -- 
> mpt




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