Credits for finding security vulnerabilities

This post describes when and how we give credit to people who report security issues.

We highly appreciate everyone who responsibly reports security issues to us: a diverse mix of community members, independent security researchers, software auditing firms, etc.

When we release a fix for a vulnerability in one of our projects, we publish a security advisory crediting the reporter, and distribute it though various Apache mailinglists, oss-security and the CVE programme: this way, we proactively signal the urgency to upgrade to our users.

The Apache Software Foundation, being a volunteer organization, does not have a bug bounty program. However, some Apache projects are covered under 3rd-party bounty programs such as the HackerOne Internet Bug Bounty.

Valid reports about our project infrastructure are typically not eligible for a CVE, as downstream users do not need to take any action, so they do not need to be notified.

Still, as a token of our appreciation, we’d like to thank a number of such reporters here:

  • Aviv Keller for helping identify a number of XSS problems in various Apache project websites, and for helping fix a large number of complex GitHub Actions permissions issues.
  • Harish for working with us to resolve a GitHub Actions issue
  • Li Jiantao of STAR Labs SG Pte. Ltd. for reporting a problem with an internal administrative tool.
  • Gaurang Maheta for notifying us of a remaining reference to polyfill.io on an ASF domain.
  • Ahmed Ghazy for notifying us of leaked credentials

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