Comment by dsacco
8 years ago
He's not wrong about the noise level. I conducted a survey of the most notable bug bounties in 2014 and found that the largest companies either have ineffective programs or quickly scale teams to handle inbound reports full-time. There are security engineers at Google and Facebook who spend a majority of their time responding to, and triaging bug bounty submissions.
That said, I disagree that bug bounties don't work for CDNs. You can scale a bug bounty up, it just requires resources. Cloudflare has those resources, and part of it is a function of the reward tiers you offer.
Bounty researchers aren't the only quasi-rational economic actors in this sytem. Cloudflare, we might surmise, get enough benefit from their bounty program that they're willing to pay for its administration costs and the occasional T-shirt, but they don't see value in spending more than that.
More than that, access to the service is actually the limiting factor for good bug bounty results. Cloudflare's bug bounty, we might surmise, works as well as it does because anyone can sign up for a Cloudflare account for free. For an enterprise CDN, who won't talk to a potential customer without the prospect of an $x0,000+/year contract, everyone who has enough access to the service to, in the general course of business, find and submit meaningful reports is employed by a customer, and likely prohibited from accepting substantial rewards. Everyone else either doesn't have enough access to submit meaningful reports, or the bug is so bad (like this one) that they'll report it regardless.
Arguably this shows that Cloudflare and other CDNs are right in their calculations: Tavis disclosed this bug to Cloudflare without promise of a payout, or even a T-shirt. Might some good Samaritan on the Internet have noticed the bug and reported it earlier if the bounty was more substantial? Perhaps. But in responding to a vulnerability of this magnitude, you want to work with someone of Tavis's caliber, who has the good of all the stakeholders in mind, not a profit-motivated rando.