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Comment by davnn | Hacker News Reader

Is 5k an appropriate amount for such a finding? Sounds incredibly cheap for such a large organization. How much would something like this be worth on the black market?

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No, that is in general the issue with security bounties. They attract mainly people who have enough time for trial and error and/or prior domain expertise and/or extremely smart in specific software. Nowadays cybersecurity is a vast field and it is not the same to be a white hat hacker specialized in Google Chrome issues than one in iOS. Not saying it cannot be the same person but the amount of time required to catch issues is long.

I think supply chain attacks are not being taken very seriously. Think that people working, for example, in Python or JavaScript use pip or npm daily no matter if they work for a nuclear agency or your uncle's bar.

In an earlier article about the exploitation of GitHub actions in general (which this specific attack on pytorch is part of) they said:

>So far, we’ve submitted over 20 bug bounty reports, raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in bounties.

So I think this is part of a chain of bounties? Though that can still be argued to be a bit too low for how powerful this exploit could be :)

Those are from different organizations, I think. So 5k from pytorch only but more from other orgs

Bug bounties do not compete with the black market. Also on the business side, they are not as efficient as just paying an internal QA or security team. Katie Mousouris, who set up Microsoft's original bug bounty program has gone into a lot of detail on this. E.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/relying-on-bug-bounties-not-ap...

This question comes of up frequently with these and it's premised on the hypothetical value of the bug on 'the black market'. The vast majority of such reported vulnerabilities have a 'black market' value of roughly zero, though, including this one. This doesn't say anything about the quality of the research, just that it's pretty hard to get monetary or other value out of most vulnerabilities.

It’s quite a bit more nuanced than that. Businesses only want to pay because it costs less than the damage done to the brand and/or lawsuits from users/data controllers. They don’t want to pay more than that. Researchers need money and are able to sell the fruits of their research to whomever they want. Generally, good-natured people will especially see if the bounty is worth it. It’s clean money, so it has additional value vs. selling it on the black market.

So, as you can hopefully see, it is a balancing act between all parties.

No, I don't think that holds much explanatory power - the vast majority of vulns have not only zero black market value, they also carry effectively zero brand or legal liability risk. This is also the case for this vuln.

Generally, getting root on internal infrastructure is just a step away from doing whatever you want. Even if it is just waiting for someone to ssh in with -A set so they can steal your ash keys.

A good rule of thumb is that if an exploit doesn't drop pin-compatibly into a pre-existing business model that has repeatedly used similar exploits in the past, it's worth nothing in a "commoditized" vulnerability market --- the kind HN tends to think of in these stories ("Zerodium" being the most common example). You can theoretically find someone who will listen to your story and give you money, but at that point you aren't so much selling a vulnerability as helping plan a heist.

I could be wrong about this, but I've been loud about it around people who do a lot of this stuff and none of them have dunked on me in public. :)

Yes that is exactly the sort of thing that has zero non-bounty dollar value and next to no legal or brand risk.

While I'm not familiar with the black market, I refuse to believe that an arbitrarily modified pytorch binary release has zero value.

That’s fine but it isn’t much of an argument.

Maybe 5k is the max payout for the bug class?

you have to consider that in the black market the rates would absorb the illegality of the action. while 5k is 'clean'

Monero is always clean, too.

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