No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.
– Bill Joy, Sun Microsystems
Vendors need a mechanism to receive vulnerability reports from others. This reporting mechanism should be easy enough to use that it encourages rather than discourages reports. It can be as simple as a dedicated email address for reporting security issues, a secure web form, or a bug bounty program.
Whether you are a vendor or a coordinator, you need to have open channels for communication with vulnerability finders and reporters. In our experience, the most common means of communication is email. For this reason, the CERT/CC recommends that vendors establish a specific and well-publicized email alias such as <security@example.com> solely for receipt of vulnerability reports.
However, since email is an insecure communications channel by default, many vendors, reporters, and coordinators prefer to use encrypted mail instead. Although x.509 encrypted mail exists, we have found PGP-compatible tools such as GnuPG to be more widely used by CVD participants. Vendors are encouraged to create and publish a PGP key affiliated with the security email alias to allow the confidentiality of sensitive reports to be maintained in transit.
Alternatively, some vendors choose to offer a web form specifically for receiving reports of security-related issues. Such forms can then deliver the report directly to your security or engineering team. The CERT/CC discourages reliance on general "Contact Us" web forms that pass through an organization's communications or customer support teams. Many finders will balk at having to get past these nontechnical interfaces into the vendor. In addition, security messages often must be triaged and processed differently than other incoming contacts.
Another possibility is to make use of a third-party bug bounty or coordination platform. For more information on common CVD tools, see Section 7.
Anyone who becomes aware of a vulnerability that does not appear to have been remediated should report the vulnerability to the vendor. One should not assume that a vendor is aware of a specific vulnerability unless it has already been publicly reported, whether by the vendor or elsewhere. The easier it is to report vulnerabilities to a vendor, the less likely that the vendor will be surprised by vulnerability reports disclosed directly to the public.
Aside from the technical aspects of encouraging reporting, vendors can also provide reporters with other incentives, as discussed in Section 2.4.
As a vendor, it is important to not treat reporters with suspicion or hostility. It's likely they have important information about your product, and they want to share it with you.
Furthermore, vendors should take care not to frustrate reporters' attempts to make contact by building too many assumptions into their CVD process. In the course of our own vulnerability coordination efforts, we have observed all of the following erroneous assumptions built into vendor's CVD process:
Reporting a vulnerability requires that the vulnerability is well-documented. This typically means providing the following information:
description of the impact of the vulnerability and attack scenario (Kymberlee Price discusses the importance of providing a clear attack scenario in her article [1]).
Reporters that do not provide enough information to a vendor or coordinator may find their reports delayed or even rejected. Using CWE [2] or CAPEC [3] as a reference might be helpful to describe the type of vulnerability you have found and common ways to fix it the problem.
An example of a template for a vulnerability report, based on the CERT/CC's own Vulnerability Reporting Form (VRF) [4], is provided in Appendix D. Vendors that require additional information to validate reports should clearly document their specific requirements in their vulnerability disclosure policy, reporting form, or process description