Comment by SwellJoe
8 years ago
Wow, that's much worse than I would have guessed. I would have assumed 10:1, tops. We get security reports, and sometimes they ask for a bounty, and only a very small number are bogus (but we don't have a formal bounty program). Less than half of our security issue reports are totally bogus, and another quarter are theoretical issues, but result in some sort of clean up in the code (e.g. no one can figure out how it could be exploited, but it gets refactored anyway).
I've been meaning to try a formal bounty program, as our software is a high value target (administrative tool running on over a million systems), but we're Open Source and don't have a lot of budget for bounties or anything else. If it produced hundreds of reports for every valid issue, it'd be counter-productive, for sure.
The bounty prices won't be the problem. The constant negotiation over 100,000 different variants of unchecked redirection and login fixation will be the issue. Time is money.
Hacker One should rename itself The Institute For Advanced Redirect Studies. I'm only partly kidding: bug bounty submitters are good at redirecting. Way better than I was before I started handling bounties. There's an interesting epistemological discussion to have about the low-value-yet-severity:critical bugs people file on bounty programs, because the level of cleverness required to exploit URL parsing differences between platforms is no less than what it takes to get an XSS bug.
It sounds like your system might be a candidate for https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS/Secure_Open_Source.
There's a form listed under "How to apply", and an email address nearby.
It appears that projects are only documented once audited, FWIW.