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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Actually it's the exact opposite. Bug bounty programs have constantly proven to be among the most effective ways of increasing a company's security, no matter how "pitiful" the payouts are. The overwhelming majority of people, when they find an exploit, are going to to do the right thing and report it, not sell it to the highest bidder. Increasing the bounties isn't really going to help, considering there's always going to be a hacker group or government entity willing to pay more.

Of course the programs aren't going to be a replacement for real product security teams, but they were never meant to be.

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Actually you are both right. Bug bounty programs are extremely effective because they find serious vulnerabilities for vastly less than the damages you would expect if they were exploited. However, the fact that the bug bounties are so low indicates that the prevailing security is atrocious.

To explain, generally speaking a bug bounty is going to the smaller of:

1. Cost of Discovery since that is the amount someone would be willing to find bugs at otherwise they are losing money on each bounty they get.

2. Cost of Damage (risk-adjusted) since that is the most a company would be willing to pay.

The reason for this is that as long as the Cost of Discovery is lower than the Cost of Damage (up to ROI), it is reasonable to keep paying the Cost of Discovery since you are paying less than the risk-adjusted harm. But, there is also no point paying significantly more than the Cost of Discovery as long as people keep reporting problems as fast as you can fix them since there is no real reason to pay to get more problems than you can fix. So, to first order the bug bounty for a certain type of problem reflects the cost of discovery of that type of problem.

Circling back to the original point, we see problems that can cause millions in damages getting bug bounties on the order of $10K. This means that, to first order, million dollar attacks only cost $10K to execute which results in a crazy high ROI in the 100s. With an ROI in the 100s, it should be no wonder that such attacks have been increasing in frequency given their sheer profitability. The fact that bounties are so low for such critical problems is a major indictment on the prevailing level of security in the industry.

> 1. Cost of Discovery since that is the amount someone would be willing to find bugs at otherwise they are losing money on each bounty they get.

This is probably the biggest issue in terms of incentives to a researcher. You're either finding the bug by accident or out of curiosity, or you stop short of basically losing money you would otherwise earn going a paid audit.

This seems like the market for risk at work. Just as in drug trafficking, more money tends to go to parties that take on more risk. In this case, that's the criminals doing the extorting. So unless the security researcher wants to engage in illegal activity themselves, they probably aren't going to get anywhere close to the extortion dollar amount by just selling their exploit to criminals. At best they'll probably get something close to a large bug bounty, or maybe a few times that.

When setting bug bounty payouts, the company should be looking at what security researchers are likely to get when selling an exploit to criminals, not the actual extortion dollar amount (assuming that most security researchers are not willing to personally engage in illegal activity themselves, which appears to be the case).

However, when evaluating the value that a bug bounty program brings to the company, they should absolutely consider these typical extortion amounts.

> This seems like the market for risk at work. Just as in drug trafficking, more money tends to go to parties that take on more risk. In this case, that's the criminals doing the extorting. So unless the security researcher wants to engage in illegal activity themselves, they probably aren't going to get anywhere close to the extortion dollar amount by just selling their exploit to criminals. At best they'll probably get something close to a large bug bounty, or maybe a few times that.

This doesn't strike me as a very accurate assessment of the situation. There are already markets where people can buy and sell exploits: researchers don't have to get their hands dirty to get paid for their exploits.

You've missed my point.

I'm saying that the market value of actually performing an illegal act of extortion is higher than the market value of a zero-day, either on one of these markets or via bug bounty.

I'm arguing that the price is different because of the risk of getting caught and going to jail, not that there isn't a market for security researchers to sell exploits to criminals without otherwise getting their hands dirty.

Exactly, you need the risk adjusted prices to match up. Getting paid a bug bounty isn't very risky, so the price is always going to be lower than selling or using the exploit yourself.

That being said, I still think bug bounties are too low, even when risk adjusting.

I also don't think they're empathizing with what it would actually be like to sell a zero day.

Taking the certain $10k is the better deal over hunting for a shady buyer on shady sites who might send you some bitcoin if the deal even pans out or if they even pay. That's a lot more work and uncertainty while they act like it's just the choice between which lever to pull. A bird in the hand…

Plus, by having a bug bounty program, it indicates that they're going to be reasonable and accepting of outside bug reports. In the absence of such a program, one can't be sure that a bug report isn't going to result in angry phone calls from tech-illiterate people accusing you of hacking them.

I recently found a compromised server on a university's network. I wasn't going to cold call them to report it because I had no idea how Betty answering the phones would react. Instead, I sent it to an IT contact that I knew personally. I knew that he didn't have anything at all to do with this, but that he would know who to get it to.

For what it's worth, with regard to .edu's specifically, you can always report any security-related issues to REN-ISAC [0] via e-mail or telephone (anonymously, if you'd like). The "watch desk" is staffed 24 hours a day.

If the .edu is one of their 668 member institutions [1], they have designated security contacts at the .edu that they can directly get in touch with -- and, in many cases, can even wake somebody up at 3 a.m., if/when it's warranted!

Even if the .edu isn't a member, though, they'll almost certainly have an easier time getting in touch with someone with a clue that they can pass your report along to.

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[0]: https://www.ren-isac.net

[1]: https://www.ren-isac.net/membership/MemberList.html

But if the bounties are 20x as high then surely it will draw more whitehats to the market. A security engineer who is working at Netflix or Visa making over $200k or whatever will not work late nights for a $10k bounty but he might for a $500k bounty.

Companies like Google and Facebook have paid up to $50K for single bug reports. Ultimately the problem is that regardless of the effort you put in your earnings are likely going to be $0, due to the sheer amount of randomization and luck involved, which makes it unlikely that anyone will leave their full time job for it.

I don’t think anyone will quit their job for it but it will influence the decision of “play flight simulator or hack on targets”

In theory yes, but there’s going to be serious diminishing returns. At what point does doubling the reward no longer double the number of person hours you’re incentivising to work on the problem? At what point does doubling it increase the effort expended by less than 10%? Compared to spending that money on your own research teams, where the Cost/effort your buying is likely to be much closer to linear.

On the contrary, for low-probability payouts like lotteries, doubling the reward more than doubles the number of people who play. Almost nobody would play a lottery that gives you a 1 in 50 chance of winning $5, but plenty of people play lotteries for a 1 in a billion chance of $100 million.

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