I think you've misunderstood what's happening here. Zerodium, the company mentioned in this article, is an exploit broker. They buy vulnerabilities from researchers, then sell them on to government intelligence agencies. The entire purpose of their business is to undermine the security of the tools we use.

Bug bounties are a response to this trade in exploits. They incentivise researchers to publish vulnerabilities rather than selling them to spies. They're a necessary evil to keep zero-day vulnerabilities out of the hands of oppressive regimes. It's not nice, but that's just the world we live in.

Large companies that rely on open source software have started to understand the importance of financially supporting OSS development, largely as a result of the Heartbleed crisis. The Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative has created a secure financial foundation for critical open source projects.

or provide an opportunity for the original developers to introduce an obscure backdoor and cash out

Was there any instance of this? Are there disincentives against this? (I guess the entity offering the bounty could say, only software released before this day is available. Though malicious contributors can very certainly guess that there will be other future bug bounties too.)

I believe sometime ago there was new surrounding backdoored crypto also on the low-level side of things there was a secret rootkit in Street Fighter that allowed for an EOP

https://github.com/FuzzySecurity/Capcom-Rootkit

https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-17/materials/eu-17-Filiol-B...

It's not only Zerodium there are a lot of government contractors who buy/fund attack research especially in things like Theoretical Cryptography, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Formal Verification.

> They incentivise researchers to publish vulnerabilities rather than selling them to spies. They're a necessary evil to keep zero-day vulnerabilities out of the hands of oppressive regimes. It's not nice, but that's just the world we live in.

I think it's quite interesting that we don't see Bug bounties for things like Theoretical Cryptography like Quantum-safe encryption, Formal Verification, and the like. But hasn't there been cases where Bug bounties have been subverted for evil or are just broken entirely.

> The Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative has created a secure financial foundation for critical open source projects.

For critical open source projects hasn't there been an increase in Formal Verification and more Theoretical approaches to security ?

History of security improvements in UNIX derived OSes is building band ainds to work around it.

That was handled very poorly by the open-source project, I think all projects need something like kentcdodds's all-contributors[0] guidelines which does require additional tooling and there is definitely additional code reviewing care in order to merge Pull Requests but it makes all contributors feel good when they look back at the effort of all contributions. I experienced this first hand when I contributed to one of the open source modules of the guy, the repo tooling didn't let me submit the code and I said to myself "well this is stupid, I just need the code to be merged ASAP", after a few minutes at first I figured it out and the PR got accepted. Now I can actually go back and say "hey look at my face in the Readme of the repo, that's me, yay!" which sounds stupid but I assure you I won't hesitate to contribute again.

[0]https://github.com/kentcdodds/all-contributors

This falls apart pretty quickly. You're assuming that people writing open source software WANT money or WANT fame. If they want those things, then they should ensure they go about it the proper way. As with nearly everything in life, nobody is just going to hand it to you.

As for people finding exploits being "bad". If I volunteer to build a playground, then forget lag bolts on the walkway, is the person who reports the missing bolts bad? Or are they GOOD because they informed someone who could fix it before someone got hurt?

Finding exploits, and paying for exploits isn't a bad thing. There's a reason we have inspectors. What you can very much argue is a bad this are companies like Zerodium who use those exploits to intentionally harm everyone else. It would be the equivalent of a lawyer hiring an inspector to review every public playground he could find so that he could file lawsuits.

I'm just saying that the situation is sad. So there were people who built a playground. And then there were people who found bugs in the design or the implementation. The sad situation is that people will make heroes only from those who found bugs. They even want to pay for that. And for the work of those who built that? Seems like they will be forgotten, or blamed for the bugs.

I'd rather see both groups treated the same way.

> Finding exploits, and paying for exploits isn't a bad thing.

I agree. What is bad is paying only for the exploits, totally forgetting about all the people who worked on building the code.

Just imagine that you are paying for building a house. But you will pay only for the problems that will be found. I think that in a couple of months you will get buildings full of problems, and then the builders will find them, and get payed. This will be quite terrible.

I've been looking at open source communities especially in the Vulnerability research space it seems there's been a lot of favoritism towards attack oriented research from the community.

Come on, that's not true. There was a sectest made on dovecot a while back, and it came out to be a really well written piece of software, and everybody complimented the authors and had kind words for them. Same for ssh and a lot of other oss.

http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13