Dropbox is the latest major company to turn to the power of the hacker community in an effort to ensure that its services are vulnerability-free.
The online file sharing giant announced on Wednesday the launch of a bug bounty program via the HackerOne platform.
“While we work with professional firms for pentesting engagements and do our own testing in-house, the independent scrutiny of our applications has been an invaluable resource for our team — allowing our team to tap into the expertise of the broader security community,” Dropbox security engineer Devdatta Akhawe said in a blog post.
Researchers who contribute to making Dropbox safe and secure can earn a minimum of $216 per bug. The good news is that there is no maximum reward; vulnerability reports will be rewarded based on their quality and the severity of the flaw.
Another piece of good news is that researchers who reported critical vulnerabilities before the launch of the bug bounty program will be awarded retroactively. Dropbox has already awarded researchers a total of more than $15,000, the largest reward paid out by the company so far being $4,913.
For the time being, the following applications are in the scope of Dropbox’s bug bounty program: the Dropbox and Carousel mobile and web apps, the Dropbox desktop client, and the Dropbox Core SDK. Researchers who report vulnerabilities in other properties, with some exceptions, will not get any monetary rewards, but they can be listed in the company’s hall of fame.
Dropbox has clarified that vulnerabilities found in products such as Pixelapse, Loom, MobileSpan, and Readmill are out of scope.
The list of security issues that are not eligible for rewards includes weaknesses related to password and account policies, the lack of CSRF tokens, missing security headers, malware and arbitrary content hosting, self-XSS, XSS on domains other than *.dropbox.com, bypassing storage limits, attacks from rooted mobile devices, malware detection bypassing, and insecure SSL/TLS ciphers.
Dropbox urges researchers to share the vulnerabilities they find in detail, give the company a reasonable time to respond to their report, not access any user data without permission, and not degrade the performance of Dropbox services.
Related: Western Union Launches Public Bug Bounty Program
Related: Pinterest Starts Paying Researchers Who Report Vulnerabilities
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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