Disclosure Policy

A good chunk of our disclosure policies resembles that of Google's Project Zero. We believe they have established a fair, yet responsible, disclosure policy. Google's disclosure policy can be found here.

​

We believe that vulnerability disclosure is a two-way street. Vendors, as well as researchers, must act responsibly. This is why Hackers for Change adheres to a 90-day disclosure deadline. We notify vendors of vulnerabilities immediately, with details shared in public with the defensive community after 90 days, or sooner if the vendor releases a fix. That deadline can vary in the following ways:

 

• If a deadline is due to expire on a weekend or CA/US public holiday, the deadline will be moved to the next normal work day.

 

• Before the 90-day deadline has expired, if a vendor lets us know that a patch is scheduled for release on a specific day that will fall within 14 days following the deadline, we will delay the public disclosure until the availability of the patch.

 

• When we observe a previously unknown and unpatched vulnerability in software under active exploitation (a “0day”), we believe that more urgent action—within 7 days—is appropriate. The reason for this special designation is that each day an actively exploited vulnerability remains undisclosed to the public and unpatched, more devices or accounts will be compromised. Seven days is an aggressive timeline and may be too short for some vendors to update their products, but it should be enough time to publish advice about possible mitigations, such as temporarily disabling a service, restricting access, or contacting the vendor for more information. As a result, after 7 days have elapsed without a patch or advisory, we will support researchers making details available so that users can take steps to protect themselves.

 

As always, we reserve the right to bring deadlines forwards or backwards based on extreme circumstances. We remain committed to treating all vendors strictly equally. Hackers for Change expects to be held to the same standard.

 

This policy is strongly in line with our desire to improve industry response times to security bugs, but also results in softer landings for bugs marginally over deadline. We call on all researchers to adopt disclosure deadlines in some form. Creating pressure towards more reasonably-timed fixes will result in smaller windows of opportunity for blackhats to abuse vulnerabilities. In our opinion, vulnerability disclosure policies such as ours result in greater overall safety for users of the Internet.