DSA Urgency Critical

Christoph Steiger <[email protected]> Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:24:46 +0200
Newsgroups gmane.linux.debian.devel.security
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi all,

currently DSA have the following urgency field values: high, medium, 
low, unimportant, not yet assigned and end of life.

In other formats, one example being the OSSF, the severity of a 
vulnerability is rated with the CVSS scoring system [1]. I know that 
Debian does not adhere to that scoring system, but the ratings of a 
score are very similar to the DSA Urgency field [2] (Section 5, Table 
14): Critical, High, Medium, Low and None.

I could not find any "hard" criteria for the assessment of the Urgency 
of DSAs, and I assume this is done by intuition of the Debian security 
team. Most of the people involved in a vulnerability remediation process 
are used to the CVSS scoring system and its ratings (or so I have heard, 
I am not one myself). Having such similar rating names might lead to 
confusion about their meaning as it might be different and thus cause 
friction in vulnerability remediation processes.

So my first questions would be how the Urgency is determined, and if the 
determination is somewhat related to the CVSS qualitative ratings? And 
secondly what would we think about adding a new Urgency: critical? Would 
it be useful and how much effort would it be to implement?

[1] https://ossf.github.io/osv-schema/#severitytype-field
[2] https://www.first.org/cvss/v3.0/specification-document

Best regards,
Christoph Steiger