Shaming Ivan, the head of SEAR, on Twitter is how people who should get paid bounties, but aren't, make progress.
The only crusade I'm on is against the idea that companies ruthlessly avoid paying bounties, which is, on information and belief, flatly false, like, the opposite of the truth. I think it's valuable for people to get an intuition for that.
Thanks for this!
Every organization includes a mess of situations where the overall best interest of the organization no longer comes through. Groups and individuals don't want to admit mistakes both personal and in wider senses and have alliances, competitions, team and organizational loyalty that twists their behavior.
A lot of organizations know they would benefit from having a proper whistle blower program and then proceed to crucify the first person who uses it.
Eh, it's likely usually true, but I've worked for a company which was attracted to the bounty program idea mainly for the optics and very much did push back on/was very reluctant to pay out on bounties.
And when I say "for the optics" I mean not only for the company being able to boast about having a bounty program but also the executive in question having something for his quarterly report. Having it not be too expensive was definitely part of the deal.
Needless to say this was a terrible company with terrible leadership, but it's a data point...
Apple historically used to have a deservedly good reputation for this. I was quite shocked at this story.
Definitely not, in fact rather the opposite. I was just sharing the anecdote as a counter to the otherwise fairly blanket claims being made upstream.
Are they? Apple only started their bug bounty program (with monetary rewards) merely 5 years ago, 12 years after first iOS release and well after everyone else. They are not very transparent about bugs and payouts (which is understandable) so I wonder where this good reputation comes from?
(if you count their invitation-only program then it started in 2016, 8 years ago)
I think they could use a little more ritualized shaming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveling_mechanism
Only Linus is brave enough to do this.
But does that matter to security researchers or the public? No. Apple should fix their bounty program regardless of the reason it's broken.
Ultimately, this blog post is just another example on the already large pile[1][2][3][4][5]
1: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/09/three...
2: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2021/07/13/more-trouble-with-the-app...
3: https://medium.com/macoclock/apple-security-bounty-a-persona...
4: https://theevilbit.github.io/posts/experiences_with_asb/
5: https://shail-official.medium.com/accessing-apples-internal-...
I'd be rueful about leaving so many holes in my original argument, but I think these are useful conversations to have. Thanks!
If you think that any major vendor bug bounty has incentives to stiff researchers, I'm commenting to tell you that's a strong sign you should dig deeper into the dynamics of bounty programs. They do not have those incentives.
This is not from an examination of when bug programs work but when they have very demonstrably not worked in the past.
If the cost of an uncharitable blog post is less than the cost of paying out the bounty, then a company would still be incentivized to find as many reasons to reject a payout as possible, as long as future reporters still believe they have a good chance of receiving a payout (e.g., if they believe they can sideskirt any rejection reasons).
Another in my long-running dramatic series "businesses pay spectacularly more for determinism and predictability than nerds like us account for".
Look up "apple bug bounty" on Google, or any other search engine of your choice, and you'll find absolutely no shortage of people complaining of issues with the program. If these complaints each cost Apple a bajillion dollars, then why haven't they shut down their program already?
Or, if almost all of those complaints are just from the reporter being dumb, then how are potential future reporters (who would care about the company's prospenity to pay) supposed to find actual meaningful complaints among the noise?
I don't think that sporadic blog posts are nearly as powerful as you're making them out to me: my intuition tells me that the company can usually ignore them safely, short of them making front-page news.
The only thing here I'm going to push back on, and forcefully, is the idea that bounty programs have an incentive to stiff researchers. They do not. I cannot emphasize enough how "not real money" these sums are. Bounty program operators, the people staffing these programs, don't get measured on how few bounties they pay out.
After all, it's not like Apple goes around handing out free iPhones on the street, even though a few thousand units are similarly "not real money". Businesses care about small effects on the margin.
(I have no opinions in either direction about whether Apple is denying bounty payments because of difficulties operating the program!)
After all, one might easily imagine a forgiving rule of "we'll pay some amount of money (whether large or small) for any security issue we actively fix based on the information in the report", and yet Apple seemingly chooses to be more fussy than that in this case, unless they're just being extremely slow. I just don't see any way to square such apparent fussiness with your experience of bug bounty programs leaning toward paying out more.
I replied upstream as well, but let me push back here as well. They can actually, if the bounty program is being run for the wrong reasons, which can happen - I know anecdotes aren't data, but I've seen one case first-hand.
If a bounty program is treated as a marketing project and/or an "executive value" project then they can and will be managed as a cost center and those costs will be deliberately minimized. Bang for buck. Now obviously this is perverse but if making your manager happy isn't an incentive then I don't know what to tell you.
But then I can see your point to a degree at least.
None of this is to say that the program is managed perfectly, as has been pointed out elsewhere on the thread. I'm not qualified to have a take on that question.
It’s one of the most infuriating and frustrating experiences I ever had in computing. They clearly don’t want you sharing the issue publicly, but just string you along indefinitely. I’m honestly reaching my limit.
I don’t even care about the bounty money, I just want the bugs fixed. I’d give them all the latitude in the world if I thought the matters were taken seriously, but I don’t believe they are.
See the rest of the thread for a further response on this, esp. w/r/t Apple itself.
And now we starting to get a lot of AI generated submitted stuff. Take a lot of effort just sort trough the bullshit to accept the good ones, and then to manage it and fix things within SLA when not critical is very easy it gets pushed very down the backlog, competing with all different kind of request from customers to fix things. Code changes might be a one liner but testing etc can blow up stuff to be a very long process.
> The sums involved are not meaningful to the company
Which makes it the more bewildering to see how mishappen the handling is
I was really expecting you to say this doesn't happen, I'm now left wondering why security researcher's are willing to take such risks.
The easiest way to show this would be to give the responsibility of managing the bug bounty to a third party who isn't involved in the business.