Department
of the Interior
Vulnerability Disclosure Policy
January 7, 2021
The Department of
the Interior (DOI) is committed to ensuring protection of security
information (American public and associated) under its jurisdiction. This
policy is intended to give security researchers guidelines for conducting
vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to
submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.
This policy describes what systems and types of research are
covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability
reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait
before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.
We
encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems.
If you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your
security research, we will consider your research to be authorized. We will work with you to understand and
resolve identified issues quickly, and DOI will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your
research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for
activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make
this authorization known.
Under this policy, “research” means activities in which you:
·
Notify us as soon as possible after you discover
a real or potential security issue.
·
Make every effort to avoid privacy violations,
degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and
destruction or manipulation of data.
·
Only use exploits to the extent necessary to
confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or
exfiltrate data, establish command line access and/or persistence, or use the
exploit to pivot to other systems.
·
Provide us a reasonable amount of time to
resolve the issue before you disclose it publicly.
·
Do not submit a high volume of low-quality
reports.
Once you’ve established that a
vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including personally
identifiable information, financial information, or proprietary information or
trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately,
and not disclose this data to anyone else.
The following test methods are not authorized:
This policy applies to the following systems and services:
Any service not expressly listed above, such as any connected
services, are excluded from scope and are not authorized for
testing. Additionally, vulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall
outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor
according to their Disclosure DOI Policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a
system is in scope or not, contact us at security@doi.gov before starting your research (or at the
security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS).
Though we develop and maintain other internet-accessible systems or
services, we ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the
systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a
particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us
to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.
Information
submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to
mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly
discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and
not solely Agency Name, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated
vulnerability disclosure process. We will not share your name or
contact information without express permission.
We accept vulnerability reports via
electronic mail at
security@doi.gov. Reports may be submitted anonymously.
Acceptable message formats are plain text, rich text, and HTML.
By submitting a vulnerability, you
acknowledge that you have no expectation of payment and that you expressly
waive any future pay claims against the U.S. Government related to your
submission.
In order to help us triage and prioritize
submissions, we recommend that your reports provide a detailed technical
description of the steps required to reproduce the vulnerability, including a
description of any tools needed to identify or exploit the vulnerability. Images, e.g., screen captures, and other
documents may be attached to reports. It
is helpful to give attachments illustrative names. Reports may include proof-of-concept code
that demonstrates exploitation of the vulnerability. We request that any
scripts or exploit code be embedded into non-executable file types.
· Within 3
business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.
· To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.
· We will maintain
an open dialogue to discuss issues.
Questions
regarding this policy may be sent to security@doi.gov. We also invite you
to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.
Put date page was created/modified. January 7, 2021