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Comment by cwkoss | Hacker News Reader

I submitted an XSS on the tesla website to hackerone, it was marked as a duplicate. A week later, shared it with an XSS mailing list and got an angry email from HackerOne soon after. Public disclosure violates the terms of their reporting program EVEN if they reject your report.

I'm really curious how much of what is reported to HackerOne ever gets and actual patch. It kind of seems like there are bunch of known vulnerabilities idling on their platform without quick fixes. Should be interesting once the HackerOne database is inevitably leaked.

HackerOne should start requiring companies pay researchers for duplicates - that the company already knew of a flaw should make them more liable, not less.

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> HackerOne should start requiring companies pay researchers for duplicates

That would create a perverse incentive for researchers to tell their friends about the vulnerability so that they can resubmit it and also get a bounty.

The problem could be solved on the side of the researchers by splitting the bounty among all submissions of the same bug, but anyone else with access to the report (employees of either HackerOne or the relevant company) could try to get a share by having someone create a duplicate report.

First come, first served seems like it would be the hardest to game, as the first reporter is guaranteed to have actually done the work (not counting rogue employees who create bugs to "find" and report).

There should probably still be some kind of reward for duplicate reports to avoid discouraging researchers, but something symbolic like publicly acknowledging that they found a bug might be enough to provide validation.

> First come, first served seems like it would be the hardest to game

For external parties, yes. However it's the easiest to game for those liable, since you can just mark whatever you want as a "duplicate" and refuse to pay the bounty.

Offering bounties for public disclosures helps remove a lot of perverse incentives.

I like your first idea of splitting the bounty. I think its unlikely employees of HackerOne or the relevant company would risk their job for a small share in a bug bounty.

Splitting the bounty does nothing to fix the incentive problem, since it's the same outlay from the vendor whether they fix after 1 report, or a year later after 20.

In reality, vendors (or at least, serious vendors) aren't gaming H1 to stiff bounty hunters. If anything, the major complaint vendors have about H1 is that they aren't paying enough --- that is, they deal with too many garbage reports for every report that actually merits a fix.

I wonder if you could scale it so that the goal behaviors were also a market equilibrium. So no complicated prohibitions for going public, but each additional report (aided easily by going public) would cut into your own earnings some percentage. But on the flip side, each additional report costs the company money too, so they have monetary incentive also for pushing a fix before someone else finds it or you decide to give up waiting and go public with it anyways. With each on appropriately decreasing scales so there’s always appropriate minimum and maximum payouts.

I assume it'd be hard to convince companies it may be in their better interest to set up an incentive structure this way. But perhaps a third party platform could find some such mutually beneficial equilibrium.

Obligatory Dilbert: https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13

If they get a duplicate report they should let you know the disclosure timeline and keep you posted on progress fixing it. If they're not doing that they have no right to prevent disclosure.

Hackers and crackers can't be controlled.

It seems weird that HackerOne put themselves in such a deeply loser position to try to be the ones to prevent submitters from revealing security issues. Why not be a neutral party, and let the companies try to enforce rules on the hackers in these cases?

Could you tell me what this mailing list is? I'd be interested in joining it.

"Cheapbugs" but it appears it is abandoned.

Eh that one is on you I think. How long did you wait? If we have 5 researchers report the same vulnerability in 30 days we're going to count it as duplicate and still expect to have a full 60-90 days from the first report to deploy a fix.

Waited a couple weeks.

It was pretty low hanging fruit. I was going through an XSS tutorial and used their site for practice. `<script>alert(1)` could be saved into several user fields including Name and would then be executed on every subsequent pageload around the site.

If there was some indication that someone had reported it recently I maybe would have waited longer, but I suspect this bug had been known for months.

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