Reddit this week announced the launch of a public bug bounty program on the vulnerability hunting platform HackerOne.
Following a three-year private bug bounty program on HackerOne, which has resulted in over $140,000 being awarded in bug bounties for 300 vulnerability reports focusing on reddit.com, the program is going public with an expanded scope.
The purpose of the program, Reddit notes, is to keep users’ accounts, identities, and private data protected, including chats, messages, email addresses, voting records, and subreddit subscriptions.
“In addition to user posted content, it is important that Reddit maintain the confidentiality of user identities and the integrity of discussions in Reddit’s communities and private spaces. It is with these things in mind that Reddit evaluates the impact and severity of each reported vulnerability,” Reddit says.
For that, the company has decided to expand the bug bounty program’s scope to include most of its assets, except for those that are explicitly out-of-scope. All reddit.com and snooguts.net subdomains are included.
Vulnerability reports should contain enough information to allow Reddit’s team to replicate the security hole. Eligible reports may qualify for bounty awards of up to $10,000 if the vulnerability is deemed critical. Researchers may receive up to $5,000 for high-severity issues, $500 for medium-severity bugs, and $100 for low-severity flaws.
Security holes are considered critical if they lead to the bulk compromise of user data, including password hashes, email addresses, private chats and messages, or if they could allow an attacker to bypass authentication and access accounts.
Researchers interested in participating are prohibited from accessing other users’ accounts or data, from publicly disclosing the identified vulnerabilities unless they have Reddit’s explicit consent, or from sharing details on the bugs before the Reddit staff patches them.
Furthermore, researchers are prohibited from scanning Reddit’s internal network after gaining remote access to a server, as well as from abusing discovered vulnerabilities to upload malware, to further weaken the security of impacted systems, or from affecting the performance or availability of Reddit.
Full details on the assets in- and out-of-scope of the public bug bounty program — along with information on what Reddit expects from the researchers interested in participating in its program, and on what it’s offering them — can be found on the program’s HackerOne page.
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