Comment by tptacek
4 months ago
They're not considering it not to be a vulnerability. They're simply saying it's outside the scope of their bug bounty program.
4 months ago
They're not considering it not to be a vulnerability. They're simply saying it's outside the scope of their bug bounty program.
Apparently it's also outside the scope of their bug fixing program, despite being trivially remotely exploitable to get privileged code execution.
Man in the middle attacks may be "out of scope" for AMD, but they're still "in scope" for actual attackers.
Ignoring them is indefensibly incompetent. A policy of ignoring them is a policy of being indefensibly incompetent.
The only thing cited here is a response from their bug bounty program. Excluding MITM from a bug bounty is perfectly legitimate. Actually, excluding anything from a bounty program is.
Excluding severe vulnerabilities like ones that completely pwn your machine just by connecting it to an untrusted network is not legitimate for any reasonable bug bounty program.
Of course, a company can do it (they just did!), but it shows that they don't care about security at all.
Especially if the answer is "sorry this is out of scope" rather than "while this is out of scope for our bug bounty so we can't pay you, this looks serious and we'll make sure to get a patch out ASAP".
1 reply →
The response from the screenshot appears to be a "out of scope" response, but the blog poster used some editorial leeway and called it "wont fix/out of scope". Going forward, we can keep de-compiling and seeing if this vulnerability is still there and whether "wont fix" was a valid editorialization.
Though, by publishing this blog and getting on the HN front page, it really skews this datapoint, so we can never know if it's a valid editorialization.
Edit: Ah, someone else in this thread called out the "wont fix" vs "out of scope" after I clicked on reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910233. Sorry.
Looks like there's a serious security bug in their scope document.
If you read it carefully, you'll notice that the blog post misrepresents the AMD response.
The blog post title is "AMD won't fix", but the actual response that is quoted in the post doesn't actually say that! It doesn't say anything about will or won't fix, it just says "out of scope", and it's pretty reasonable to interpret this as "out of scope for receiving a bug bounty".
It's pretty careless wording on the part of whoever wrote the response and just invites this kind of PR disaster, but on the substance of the vulnerability it doesn't suggest a problem.
How's that? What do you think the purpose of a bug bounty is? If you think it's "to eradicate all bugs", no, very no.
I don't expect an unbounded scope but I do expect it to cover the big scary headline items like RCE. Additionally, this can be exploited without MitM if you combine with e.g. a DNS cache poisoning attack. And they can still fix it even if they're not willing to pay a bounty.
4 replies →
This is the place they direct researchers to report bugs. If they don’t want to pay out for MITM, that’s fine, but they should still be taking out-of-scope reports seriously
1 reply →
A bug bounty should motivate exploitable bugs to be reported so that they can be fixed. IMO, if it refuses to accept certain kinds of bugs that can still be exploited, it's not working properly.
2 replies →