Has there been any court case where this interpretation has been sufficient defense?
So if a case came up against Google, I imagine they would very much prefer to have this available as a defense, and draw analogies to the real world if necessary (like the home trespassing example in the link above).
I did in fact link to 2 entire pages of what might apply, based on my layman understanding:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30310902 (which is one potential "theory of law" that might apply)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30316448 (a lot of actual cases against actual individuals, each based on different legal theories)
Obviously I don't know if any of theory would make it unlawful (again, I'm not a judge or a lawyer). I just know security researchers have been sued in the past, and so far it seems to me that they have been either (a) settled out of court, (b) dropped, or (c) been scoped too narrowly to set much of a general precedent.
You don't have to feel compelled to knock anything down if you don't know; I don't really expect anyone to know at this point to be honest. (The second website I linked to also mentions this dearth of court rulings.)
Project Zero doesn't do any of this kind of research.
Nobody is going to be able to sue Project Zero for finding iOS bugs. You have an almost unlimited right to conduct security research on a phone you buy, or a piece of software you install based on a click-through license.
What you need to be very careful about is, again, testing other people's computing devices. There, you have almost no rights at all (save for services that publicly waive their own rights by standing up bounty programs --- and, don't be confused, Project Zero doesn't depend on Apple's bounty programs to conduct iOS research).
These distinctions are super-clear to people who actually work in this field, but clearly unclear to people outside it, because we end up having the same picky debates about them every time vulnerability research comes up. I get it, it looks fuzzy on the outside. But it is not fuzzy to practitioners; the rules you have to be aware of to conduct research are actually fairly straightforward. Don't mess with other people's machines.
And if one has accepted a license agreement to use the product, there's often breach of contract available as a possible basis too.
Are you saying no one has ever been sued over publishing vulnerabilities in competitors' products?
> Violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act; contributory copyright infringement; violations of the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act; breach of contract; tortious interference with contractual relations; common law misappropriation; and trespass.
Yes. Trespass.
So yes, companies have tried to sue over disclosure of security vulnerabilities in the past. In this one they even ended up settling with one of the other defendants (whom they may have had a bit more of a case against, thanks to the DMCA if nothing else), but I think they realized they had no case against me and most of the others and dropped the lawsuit. They still filed it, though, and I had to get a lawyer, which was not a fun few months.
* "Researching" serverside apps --- software running on computers the researcher doesn't own --- which is widely understood to fall afoul of CFAA and categorically isn't the kind of work P0 does.
* Breaching contracts, which happens commonly when vuln research firms take on pentest vendor assessment contracts for companies considering purchases, where the pentester access to the target was explicitly arranged under NDA.
* Stuff that isn't vulnerability research under any sane definition, as when people find open S3 buckets, grab all the files off them, and then try to "conduct research" based on the contents of the stolen files.
None of this is at play in the kind of work P0 does, and there are basically no modern stories about straight vulnerability research done under P0 terms where meaningful legal threats have been made. There was a time around the turn of the last century where it was briefly believed that the DMCA might be wielded against vuln researchers, but that didn't pan out.