avatar
Bug bounty
Public

GNOME Bug Bounty Program

Securing Open Source Ecosystem

Reward

Bounty
Hall of fame
€500
Low
€500
Medium
€3,000
High
€5,000
Critical
€10,000

Program

Avg reward
-
Max reward
-
Scopes
3

Supported languages
English

Hacktivity

Reports
10
1st response
< 1 day
Reports last 24h
-
Reports last week
1
Reports this month
1

Project

GNOME is a fully featured desktop environment and application platform for Linux. It is used by people all over the world (on e.g. Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL, Tails) in many different security-critical contexts, including by activists, journalists, corporations, and governments. This makes it a valuable target to attack, and is why it's critical to keep it secure.

The GNOME desktop consists of hundreds of individual modules. However, to begin with we're focusing this bug bounty program on two critical components, GLib and libsoup.

This bug bounty program is managed by the Sovereign Tech Fund.

Program Rules

  • We are convinced that external review by skilled security researchers is crucial to identifying weaknesses in our software.
  • We are pleased to collaborate with you to resolve issues in our specifications and software, and to fairly reward you for the discovery of new security issues.
  • Any type of attacks on our infrastructure, including our source code repositories is prohibited.
  • When you report an issue, we must be able to reproduce it with our setup.
  • An issue reported to us is considered to be a duplicate if it describes a similar attack to a known vulnerability (including issues received outside of YesWeHack) regardless of the component affected. That is, the triage team will use the "One Fix One Reward" process: if two or more programs or libraries use the same code base and a single fix can be deployed to fix all the others' weaknesses, only one issue will be considered as eligible for a reward, and other reports will be closed as Informative. We reward based on vulnerability, not per issue.

Important precautions and limitations

As a complement to the program rules and testing policy:

  • DO NOT include Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in your
    report and please REDACT/OBFUSCATE the PII that is part of your PoC
    (screenshot, terminal transcripts, etc.) as much as possible.
  • DO NOT include secret key material unless that has been created exclusively for testing purposes.

Scopes

Modules:

  • libsoup: HTTP client/server library for GNOME. It uses GObjects
    and the glib main loop, to integrate well with GNOME applications.
  • GLib: Low-level core library providing data structure handling for C, portability wrappers, and interfaces for such runtime functionality as an event loop, threads, dynamic loading, and an object system.
  • glib-networking: Implementations of certain GLib networking features that cannot be implemented directly in GLib itself because of their dependencies.

Eligibility

We are happy to thank everyone who submits valid reports that help us improve the security of Gnome, however, only those that meet the following eligibility requirements may receive a monetary reward:

  • You must be the first reporter of a vulnerability
  • The vulnerability must be a qualifying vulnerability (see below)
  • You must send a clear textual description of the report along with steps to reproduce the issue, include attachments such as screenshots as necessary. PoC exploit code in the form of a unit test similar in style to those already present in the code (where applicable) is highly appreciated.
  • You must not be a regular contributor to the relevant modules
  • Our analysis is always based on the worst impact demonstrated in your PoC
  • When reviewing source-code, the "main" or "master" branches represent the current versions that are available as packages. Only reports for those branches will be eligible for bounty


Reward

Asset value CVSS
Low
CVSS
Medium
CVSS
High
CVSS
Critical
Medium
€500€3,000€5,000€10,000

Scopes

ScopeTypeAsset value
GLib other
Medium
Low
€500
Medium
€3,000
High
€5,000
Critical
€10,000
glib-networking other
Medium
Low
€500
Medium
€3,000
High
€5,000
Critical
€10,000
libsoup other
Medium
Low
€500
Medium
€3,000
High
€5,000
Critical
€10,000

Out of scopes

  • Only the list of modules in the description is in scope. We may add more modules in the future such as
  • json-glib
  • libxml2
  • libxslt
  • gdk-pixbuf
  • librsvg
  • vte
  • gtk
  • flatpak
  • xdg-desktop-portal
  • xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
  • GNOME Shell (particularly lock screen)
  • gdm
  • tracker-miners
  • libsecret
  • oo7
  • libsecret
  • json-glib

Vulnerability types

Qualifying vulnerabilities

  • All reports must come with a full working proof of concept (PoC) that demonstrates the real impact of the issue.
  • Memory safety issues (e.g. use-after-free, double free, aliasing, out-of-bounds access)
  • Denial of service (e.g. due to crashes / panics, unbounded memory allocation, non-termination, algorithmic complexity attacks)
  • Undefined behavior leading to a security vulnerability (e.g. integer overflow)
  • Race conditions (e.g. time-of-check-to-time-of-use races on file system checks)
  • Missing validation of untrusted inputs (e.g. injection of unescaped markup in output, following untrusted symlinks)
  • Privilege escalation (e.g. trusting environment data which comes across a privilege boundary when running as setuid)
  • Cryptographic problems (e.g. using insecure crypto primitives, insufficient randomness, incorrect handling of keys)
  • Exfiltration of confidential material (e.g. publicly caching thumbnails outside an encrypted partition, creating files with overly-generous permissions)
  • Supply chain issues (e.g. non-verifiable chain of trust on release artifacts)

Non-qualifying vulnerabilities

  • Everything not in the qualifying vulnerabilities list is not accepted
  • Issues only found in outdated versions of our software (i.e. not vulnerable on the HEAD of the main or master branch)
  • Issues found in dependencies, that does not impact directly our project

Hunters collaboration

When submitting new report, you can add up to 5 collaborators, and define the reward split ratio.

For more information, see help center.
Note: For reports that have already been rewarded, it is not possible to redistribute the rewards.