U.S. Government Pilots Vulnerability Disclosure Program for DIB on HackerOne
- Pilot VDP launched on HackerOne, putting a snapshot of the DIB into the research scope.
- This is hopefully the beginning of a new era in cybersecurity, where crowd-sourcing findings are key.
- There are several limitations and “no-go” areas, so researchers need to engage responsibly.
The U.S. is looking to turn the page and start a new chapter for cybersecurity, and exploring vulnerability disclosure programs (VDPs) for critical infrastructure is the way to go. This was officially announced as a plan back in September 2020, and we are now seeing the first pilot program on HackerOne. It is set up around the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) and involves participating DoD contractor partner’s information systems, web properties, other identified scoped assets.
This is practically recognizing the value of contributions from the security researchers community. The program can be seen as an attempt to extend the “official arm” to that community and build a strong relationship with it. As the announcement points out, this expansion in vulnerability research sits on a strong basis of over 30,000 exploits on DoD’s systems, identified and responsibly reported by security researchers in previous years.
The scope is just a snapshot of the complexity and scale of the digital landscape that cybersecurity pros are on the hook to protect, Yaniv Bar-Dayan of Vulcan Cyber tells us. As he further states:
Security researcher John Jackson tells us:
For more information about the guidelines, scope of the program, legal limitations, and report submission instructions, you may check the program’s main page, where everything is laid out in detail. Reporters are allowed to test remotely, as long as it’s relevant to the detection and identification of a vulnerability, and then they’re allowed to share the information solely with DoD.
Exfiltration of data is prohibited. So is the publication of any details about the findings, the compromise of the privacy of any contractor or personnel of the DoD, and the actual exploitation that goes beyond the scope of proving the existence of a flaw. And finally, the testing scenarios that aren’t permitted under any circumstances include denial of service, phishing, and social engineering.