Vulnerability Disclosure Policy

Last Updated: May 2, 2022

Introduction

Gruntwork is committed to recognizing and encouraging responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities. This policy is intended to give security researchers, external to Gruntwork, clear guidelines for conducting security research and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.

Among other things, this policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.

We encourage you to contact us via email at security@gruntwork.io to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems.

Authorization

If you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be “authorized” under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and any applicable anti-hacking laws such as Cal. Penal Code 502(c) and Gruntwork will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known.

Please note however that if your security research involves the products, services, or systems of a third party, that third party is not bound by our commitment not to pursue legal action. You should review the disclosure policies of any relevant third parties before beginning your research.

Guidelines

Under this policy, “research” means activities in which you do the following:

  • Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.
  • Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data;
  • Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence and do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish persistent command line access, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems;
  • Provide us a reasonable amount of time to resolve the issue before you disclose it publicly; and
  • Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.

Once you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including personally identifiable information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately at security@gruntwork.io, and not disclose this data to anyone else.

Test methods

The following test methods are not authorized:

  • Network denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data; and
  • Physical testing (e.g. office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering attacks against Gruntwork employees (e.g., phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing.

Scope

This policy applies to the following systems and services:

Any service not expressly listed above, such as any connected services, are excluded from scope and are not authorized for testing. Additionally, vulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at security@gruntwork.io before starting your research.

Though we develop and maintain other internet-accessible systems or services, we ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We may increase the scope of this policy over time.

Reporting a vulnerability

We accept vulnerability reports via security@gruntwork.io. Reports may be submitted anonymously. If you share contact information, we will acknowledge receipt of your report within 3 business days.

We do not support PGP-encrypted emails. For particularly sensitive information, please reach out to support@gruntwork.io to discuss before sending over.

What we would like to see from you

In order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your report include the following:

  • A description of the location the vulnerability was discovered and the potential impact of exploitation, and
  • A detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots are helpful).

If possible, we prefer that reports are submitted in English.

What you can expect from us

We appreciate the contributions of security researchers and commit to the following:

  • If you share contact information, we will acknowledge receipt of your report within 3 business days.
  • We will notify you when the reported vulnerability is remediated, and you may be invited to confirm that the solution adequately addresses the vulnerability.
  • We may, in our sole discretion, offer to recognize your contribution by providing a reward or public acknowledgement of your efforts.

Questions

Questions regarding this policy may be sent to security@gruntwork.io. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.