Comment by tptacek
9 hours ago
That's really not why bounties exist, though people on both sides of the bounty systems claim it is. If it were broadly the case that bounties exist to offset black market sales, you wouldn't pay bounties for vulnerabilities with no market value. This vulnerability is probably a good example of something with a sub-$1000 value on any non-bounty market.
In reality, the modal benefit accruing to a company running a bounty program on receipt of a new serious vulnerability is simply engineering prioritization. You get bug reports from users when you have reliability and UX bugs, but you don't get them for security flaws, because attackers generally have to force vulnerabilities into revealing themselves --- normal users almost never run into them. Bug bounty programs fill that gap.
"This vulnerability is probably a good example of something with a sub-$1000 value on any non-bounty market."
Crazy statement. This would easily be worth more to malicious actors
The only actors who will pay you real money for a serverside RCE bug aren't buying an exploit; they're contracting with you to plan a heist. So the same analysis applies: you yourself could come up with some scheme whereby you yourself use this vulnerability to steal stuff from Google. But that's not what we're talking about when we talk about vulnerability valuations.
There is essentially no market for these kinds of serverside vulnerabilities.
I don’t understand your argument here.
If you’re saying that bug bounties exist for a reason according to both the program runners and the contributors then how is that not the reason they exist?
The people paying and the people working are all in agreement that it exists for that reason.
What part of my logic do you not follow? The way you've posed this question, the simplest response would require me to write that whole comment over again.
That’s an unnecessarily rude response I think.
I detailed my logic above.
Additionally, part of my businesses remediation services include helping companies set up bug bounty programs. Giving researchers an incentive to report bugs for payouts instead of selling or exploiting them for profits is always the intended goal.
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