If you haven't had food for a few days everything is indeed about money. Either you reward someone properly for the work that they can do or they'll find someone else who does. I doubt most people get fuzzy warm feelings helping a big US corporation that's too greedy to actually pay independent researchers properly.
Edit: That's not to say your work wasn't cool btw. It's very admirable for you to view it the way you do.
More importantly, human history shows that ethics really are important. If you ignore ethics in the name of people starving, you build a society where even more people suffer and starve. If you want to build a society where everybody is safe and healthy, you need to pay attention to ethics now, not "someday".
It took many years to understand this.
Speaking of privilege, how much privilege is there in believing that ethics aren't important, because you don't know what it's like to live in a place that never even pretended to care about it, and get robbed on a routine basis, because a bunch of other people around you don't care about ethics either, and would rather form a gang and smash anybody who has something they want than work to build a marketable skill?
That is the world you build when you advocate for people not paying attention to the harms of releasing exploits into the wild, because it might pay better than doing the right thing.
I doubt anybody capable of finding an exploit like this is in that situation
lack of opportunity, lack of skills and lack of work ethic. As in it's easy to do, no barrier to entry and always availble.
Most crimes don't actually pay very well and have poor return if you've got any sort of marketable skills. Armed robbery of a bank will get you on average $1200 and 15-20 years.
But pretending software development isn't a well paying career path, in general, is a statistically incorrect statement
No. Most software that is actually used, is not made 'for free'.
here's some job postings for software engineer in Bordeaux, France: https://www.indeed.fr/Bordeaux-(33)-Emplois-Ingenieur-Inform...
It's around three times less.
Prove me wrong is bad argumentation.
>I know people in other countries don’t make the same salaries but they are “mostly” doing pretty well for their region.
The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. Do you have any data to backup your claim?
Yet the vast amount of hacks or attempts typically originate from China or North Korea...
There are a lot of young folks that try to make this their full time job after some success, then get into a dry spell. The panic robs them of the lateral thinking that brought them to the dance to begin with, and they get into spirals of ravenously hunting simple bugs that end up as dupes and out of scope.
I think that's the problem. You shouldn't be entirely dependent on bounty money, because sooner or later you will find a bug that is worth 10x or 1000x on the black market.
I have seen white hat bounty hunters go rouge in such situations and entirely blame it on the cheap ass companies that won't offer the "right" amount.
Nobody owns you anything, you are doing this mostly for fun. The bounty is just a bonus.
That's missing a key point of the bounty system. Slack and its users are better off that this bug was 1: discovered and 2: responsibly reported. The bounty increases the number of eyes looking, but also incentivizes folks to look into weird crashes or fight through the drudgery of triaging odd behavior.
The bug value also shows how much Slack here values their security, and makes me wary of them if I was in the place to be a customer of theirs.
Most directly it shows how they value a bug bounty program. There are companies that spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year and have thousands of people in their infosec program that don’t have bug bounty programs.
You can extrapolate that to how they value security but that’s not necessarily directly correlated.
Such as?
- Work on a bounty program that rewards mitigations instead of exploits (e.g., https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/patch-rewards/). Those are much more deterministic. (But there's no black market for them.)
- Get a conventional job (possibly in software, possibly not), which pays you on a schedule.
I get the argument you're making about money, but I'm having trouble believing that going after bug bounties ever makes sense to someone in that situation, given how non-deterministic it is to find a bug.
Also (as this bug shows), it typically takes a long time between reporting a bug and having the responding team decide that it merits a bounty. In this case it took a month. (And then there's logistics about actually getting you the money at that point.) Are people who haven't eaten for a few days really going to be happy not eating for another month, even if they get a hundred thousand dollars then?
https://hackerone.com/slack/bounty_table_versions?type=team&...
I work with some security engineers who in previous jobs used to write exploits for the highest bidder. Their stuff ended up being used for exactly this. One of them even told me quite proudly, you know that exploit that was in the news, that was mine.
The lack of any ethical framework other than "I want to make as much money as possible" viscerally disgusts me. And there is far too much of this in our industry, it's rife with this sort of ingrained dollar-chasing selfishness with not a care of the consequences.
Good on you for taking a positive ethical stand against this. It's very refreshing to hear.
That refers to "spied upon" or sth like "chopped to pieces"?
In which continent?
As a slack user, seeing them pay < $2K for RCE report does not make me feel safe. Next person finding something similar might be looking into this and saying "$3K? no thank you, I take the risk of getting caught but being paid fairly."
To be clear I am not advocating for this, but it makes me concerned as a user "some people" will be more likely to do it.
And yeah those companies in term work for 3-letter agencies and foreign governments. Of course many would consider selling to them unethical, but that would be absolutely legal.
>You would sell something like this, so someone can be spied upon or maybe literally chopped to pieces? Jesus, not everything is about money
Not me, not you, but many people make it all about money. I don't think it's ridiculous to think that people can have absolutely zero ethics.
99% of people saying something about black markets or govt agencies have never really faced this decision or thought about it for more than 5 minutes. So it was a question - have you REALLY thought about it?
This is profession where your actual skills mean very little until you do something exceptional to have portfolio or become famous some other way. It's very easy to talk about ethics for people who live in western countries and have easy access to well-paid jobs, but a lot of people didn't have such options.
I don't try to justify actual criminals here, but don't be surprised when people sell 0-days to some Israeli companies or NSA-contractors.
There still are a lot of people who are not gonna be okay with said situation for long. Anyone can get more cynical and cruel / indifferent with age due to bad experiences: not getting paid well for reported issues, being cheated or getting into legal trouble for "doing the right thing". Some of us really love security research and want to make it their profession, but it's really easy to end up both without stable income or in some kind of trouble.
So I think it's important to raise awareness about it in developer community since many people don't understand how much effort is going into being white hat. It's just like the story with OpenSSL before Heartbleed: half of the world used software, but there wasn't even enough funding to pay properly even for single developer.
It would be interesting if security reporters had a habit of ending their reports with what they feel is the fair market rate.
depends on exploit, program, company etc
Just sucks - marketing, legal, the engineer and peers who reviewed it, security..
Uh lol.
Bug bounties gravitate to their market value by showing companies how valuable they actually are and forcing them to learn.
In this case it was possible to abuse lack of context isolation to overwrite functionality (first part of the JS exploit). This changed function behaviour to return (leak) a BrowserWindow class (https://www.electronjs.org/docs/api/browser-window) when calling window.open(). A BrowserWindow class allows to instantiate a new window with your own security settings :)
Some of the current non-standard functions in Slack: https://imgur.com/a/OSjS0kJ
More info: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/security
And frankly, we shouldn't be giving companies a pass for being cheap because "reporting it responsibly" is the right thing to do. These companies are benefiting to a great degree by offloading vital security research onto unaffiliated and unknown third-parties. Your time, as well as the time of any other hacker or researcher, is valuable and needs to be compensated. I don't see why it's fair to any of us that we should have to work for free or for low pay-outs just because we might be doing the right thing. Same goes for any other career that is badly paid just because "they're helping people".
However, bug bounties are not a job. Nobody is forced or obligated to do anything. I'm giving them 'a pass' in the future :) It's great people are discussing this and surely it will improve things for future researchers.
I consider bug bounties like competitions. The 'prize money' is defined beforehand. You don't have to compete if you don't want it. You can also compete for the 'notoriety'. Knowing the stakes, do you complain after getting 'first place'?
Everything you own or do is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it, everything else is just speculation.
Another approach is to take invoice for last security audit and simply pay the whole amount of that invoice to the researcher. If none was ever done (good God!), just some usual quote for pen testing the targeted application could be applied.
HackerOne could also enforce minimum payouts per exploit category.
This is a meaningless statement.
Obviously all work is more valuable to the company than what they pay you to do the work... otherwise they wouldn't pay you would they? Because they'd get nothing out of it.
If your work generates £5 for a company, then why would they pay you £5 or £6 for it? What's in it for them?
Business owners of failing businesses, when they go to sell, many times think, "I've put in a million hours for this, so I need a million dollars." But, that will never happen.
Shouldn't people like you be able to do this for a living if you want to? It's valuable work. It has real market value. It seems like you're doing this for fun and genuine interest and I do admire that. Maybe you don't want to taint your motivation with the idea of "how much money can I get for this?" I get that too. But as an outsider, I see this low pay-out and I see exploitation under the guise of "doing the right thing". I genuinely want you to be paid more. You deserve it.
I feel like the only way this kind of thing will change is if people are more vocal about how inappropriate the low compensation is for a company like Slack. Public criticism is necessary and, unfortunately, the only tool we have nowadays to effect change. I understand if this isn't a hill you want to die on, but I hope that other people (particularly people who aren't in bug hunting) are willing to pressure Slack to reconsider its policies.
The problem with "others will ignore it in the future and ultimately they lose" is that it's a passive signal that is too easily overlooked and ignored. It never reaches anybody with any kind of influence who can make changes. If a big exploit happens and somebody does a root cause analysis, it's never going to lead to the conclusion that "well, it's because we haven't been paying enough in our bug bounty program, we need to change that", if only because there's no data about how many people passed on helping them out because of the low payouts.
I support and agree to everything you are saying. I love the community response. I too loathe the bug bounty asymmetry in power between corporations and reporters, but it exists.. by design. How do you imagine a researcher can 'demand' more money in this situation? They can choose the amounts arbitrarily and there is nothing legal or ethical you can do about it.
I haven't seen any proposals for real solutions - how would you ask this? How do you decide the amount for each company? Solutions, which do not bypass ethics or laws. I hope that 'the market' will solve this eventually and I think I at least raised awareness.
Would you have done without excepting any rewards, i.e. just for fun?
In other cases maybe yes, maybe no - for some nonprofit, maybe someone needs help? are they a business and can they afford to compensate this kind of work? maybe it is some prominent product? there is no simple answer
Another option is to just disclose it to the public a set number of days after notifying them, like Project Zero.
If an obvious vuln appears, obviously report it. But, these reports require a lot of work. It'd also be perfectly ok if the researcher reported whatever obscure behaviour they found initially, and went to go look at other targets with better bounties, played with their dog, etc.
The problem with starting with the baseline of "the right thing to do is always to disclose the vulnerability to Slack regardless of how little they pay" is that it perpetuates the exploitation of legitimate and important work by skilled workers. The onus should be on Slack to provide fair compensation, not on people doing this important work to "do it out of the good of their hearts".
Slack as a company had a revenue of $401 million last year and the average payout in their bug bounty program is $1376 (https://github.blog/2018-03-14-four-years-of-bug-bounty/). That's just disgusting.
Sure, but that isn’t the user’s fault, and they’re the ones who are going to get attacked. I don’t disagree with your other points but I don’t think selling an exploit on the black market is the right solution.
Perhaps the best compromise, as I think about it, is to just make the exploit public with no prior warning to the vendor. That’s not great for users either, but at least they’re informed, and the vendor will be left scrambling. But in that case, the researcher gets paid nothing at all.
This is true, but the responsibility to protect these users is ultimately on Slack, not the researcher. If Slack's bounties are nowhere near competitive with black market prices, they are failing to protect their users and should be called out on it.
Please give us some examples of what you would consider fair in this situation.
If someone spends 100 hours coming up with, say a clickjacking vuln, it does not magically make it worth $5000. If someone spends 6 minutes coming up with zero-click sandbox bypass in chrome, its not just worth $5.
Severity matters not time, especially in a bug bounty. If you want the stability (and assurance) of actually getting paid reasonsbly and consistently for this you should get a job as a pentester.
So I would multiply that 50$ by at least 4.
But still like the other said bugs should pay by severity not by time spent.
The value of an exploit has nothing to do with the development time.
Slack is directly taking advantage of that being the only alternative. You can do whatever you want with the money. However, having a robust bug bounty program ensures a wide range of people are both willing and able to look for and report vulnerabilities. This needs to be a requirement for any large successful company handling a large amount of user data. Slack can definitely afford it, and this can be used against them the next time they report a breach.
Sure the bounty is low, but ultimately it's their money and their decision. They will deal with the 'consequences' of others skipping their program and some public shaming.
I find everyone talking about black markets etc. kind of ridiculous. Really? You would sell something like this, so someone can be spied upon or maybe literally chopped to pieces? Jesus, not everything is about money - it was a fun challenge to chain it all together and I learned a lot from it.
The most outrageous part for me was the blog post I discovered by accident - it included no references or mentions (check archive.org). Both of the code snippets there are from my RCE reports. At the same time they were denying my requests for disclosure.
Of course, I understand that coordination mistakes like this happen, so I accept their apology and move on!
Evidence - original RCE video with huge CSS injection overlay: https://www.dropbox.com/s/11pv2ghdkw5g84b/css-rce-overlay.mo...