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.
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.