DINUM - Tchap - Bug Bounty Program

About us

The Direction Interministérielle du NUMérique (DINUM)

The Direction Interministérielle du NUMérique (DINUM) is in charge of the French State's digital transformation for the benefit of citizens and civil servants alike, in all its aspects:

• Modernisation of the State's information system
• Quality of digital public services
• Creation of innovative services for citizens
• Design of digital collaborative work tools for agents

It supports public services, advises the government and develops common resources such as the Inter-ministerial State Network (RIE) or the French eIDAS node (FranceConnect).

Tchap

DINUM is developing the Tchap instant-messaging application. It is a end-to-end encrypted instant-messaging service dedicated to French administration. It is available with an Android and an iOS application, and a web interface available at https://www.tchap.gouv.fr. All of them exchange with the servers through an API at https://matrix.agent.*.tchap.gouv.fr and https://matrix.agent.tchap.gouv.fr.

The DINUM Bug Bounty approach

The DINUM considers crucial to work with trusted and qualified security researchers to identify weaknesses in its applications, regardless of the technology used, and improve its assest security by leveraging the YWH community's motivation and skills.

If you believe you have found a security problem in our products or services we'll be happy to hear about it as well as to work with you on fixing it as quickly as possible.

Of course, we expect you to work in a responsible manner given out applications' contexts in order to avoid any interruption of service and to protect the privacy of our users. Thus, please do not try to over-exploit a bug, in doubt please contact us for further guidance.

As the French public state is committed to an open data approach, most of our applications' source codes are publicly available on GitHub . If proposals for fixes and improvements on the concerned GitHub project will be appreciated mind that reporting any security issue through this mean is forbidden.

What is considered sensitive information ?

On the server (for a non Tchap participant) :

• Modification of a public keys of a user
• All information from the database, i.e. meta-data.

In a private room (for a non-participant to the room) :

• All information: messages, meta-data and attachments.
• Private keys

On mobile applications :

Exploitation of vulnerabilities or misconception of the mobile application (IOS & Android) allowing extraction of information about the user, his messages or that may lead to deeper exploitation and compromission of the Tchap application are of particular interest to us.

Nevertheless, Tchap information stored in the phone mustn't be obtained neither via a rooted nor a jailbroken phone, but only via a malware-free phone, by using the means and permissions offered to any application. This kind of technics can still be used to retrieved confidential informations that the phone shouldn't have access to.

What are sensitive information for Tchap mobile Application :

• Private Key
• Messages and attachments
• Private room meta-data

Regarding testing conditions

How to access the scope/retrieve an account

A non-production environment is available to you so you may test our application as an authenticated user. Mind that if you find the same issue on both production and non-production environment you'll only be rewarded once.

You may self-register on https://www.beta.tchap.gouv.fr by using your YWH aliases.

The system provides multiple levels of access using roles. By default, your account have the role "user". You will be able to invite other emails from this account, they will be granted the "guest" role.

On https://www.beta.tchap.gouv.fr API endpoints are https://matrix.i.tchap.gouv.fr (for the account you will create) and https://matrix.e.tchap.gouv.fr/ (API for account with "guest" role) instead of https://matrix.agent.*.tchap.gouv.fr and https://matrix.agent.tchap.gouv.fr.

Where to find our application's code and documentation

Our application is open source, the code can be found at https://github.com/tchapgouv for the clients and at https://github.com/matrix-org for the server.

Please do not notify security issues through GitHub. Notifications of publicly available issues will not be rewarded. Proposals of fix for security issues on the GitHub will be appreciated. Commit timing shall be discussed during the security issue evaluation process. Additional credits can be attributed in case of accepted pull request.

Here are the main repositories you may want to have a look at :

• Tchap Android : https://github.com/tchapgouv/tchap-android
• Tchap iOS : https://github.com/tchapgouv/tchap-ios
• Tchap Web : https://github.com/tchapgouv/tchap-web-v4
• https://github.com/tchapgouv/matrix-react-sdk
• https://github.com/tchapgouv/matrix-js-sdk
• Matrix homeserver : https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse-dinsic
• Matrix identity server : https://github.com/matrix-org/sydent
• Matrix content scanner : https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-content-scanner

About https://matrix.agent.*.tchap.gouv.fr

Note that several subdomains allow access through https://matrix.agent.*.tchap.gouv.fr and you can find them in the configuration file of the web frontend here

Regarding Forms and contact/reservation features

Please use your YWH aliases (*@yeswehack.ninja) whenever testing forms or contact features and, if possible, append the following message to free input fields (e.g. message body or comment) :

[Bug Bounty, please ignore - Contact Cybersecurity team if needed]

It'll help us triage your reports more seamlessly.

Program Rules

Reporting & Disclosure Policy

DINUM believes that working with skilled security researchers across the globe is crucial in identifying weaknesses in any technology. If you believe you've found a security issue in our products or services, we encourage you to notify us. We welcome working with you to resolve the issue promptly.

Let us know as soon as possible upon discovery of a potential security issue, and we'll make every effort to quickly resolve the issue.
Provide us a reasonable amount of time to resolve the issue before any disclosure to the public or a third-party.
Please avoid DDOSing us or causing any service disruption while testing our platform. And take care of not endangering the privacy or our members.
Do not try to over exploit the bug and access internal data for further vulnerabilities. We will determine the severity and reward accordingly.

Testing Policy and Responsible Disclosure

Please adhere to the following rules while performing research on this program:

• Denial of service (DoS) attacks on our applications, servers, networks or infrastructure are strictly forbidden.
• Avoid tests that could cause degradation or interruption of our services.
• Do not use automated scanners or tools that generate large amount of network traffic.
• Do not leak, manipulate, or destroy any user data or files in any of our applications/servers.
• Do not copy any files from our applications/servers and disclose them.
• No vulnerability disclosure, full, partial or otherwise, is allowed.

Reward Eligibility and Amount

We are happy to thank everyone who submits valid reports which help us improve our security, 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).
• The report must contain the following elements:
  • Clear textual description of the vulnerability, how it can be exploited, the security impact it has on the application, its users and our organisation, and remediation advice on fixing the vulnerability
  • Proof of exploitation: screenshots demonstrating the exploit was performed, and showing the final impact
  • Provide complete steps with the necessary information to reproduce the exploit, including (if necessary) code snippets, payloads, commands etc
• You must not break any of the testing policy rules listed above.
• You must not be a former or current employee of our organisation or one of its contractors.
• If you find the same vulnerability several times, please create only one report and eventually use comments. You'll be rewarded according to your findings.
• The triage team will use the "One Fix One Reward" process: if two or more endpoints/forms use the same code base and a single fix can be deployed to fix all the other weaknesses, only one endpoint will be considered as eligible for a reward and other reports will be closed as Informative/Duplicate.

Reward amounts are based on:

• Reward grid of the report's scope
• CVSS scoring and actual business impact of the vulnerability upon performing risk analysis

Reports of leaks and exposed credentials

In the context of this program, we do not intend to encourage, accept or reward reports of leaks that are not applicable to our program’s scope and identified outside of our program’s scope, such as:

• Exposed credentials in/from an out-of-scope asset/source
• Sensitive information exposed in/from an out-of-scope asset/source

Also, in order not to encourage dark and grey economies, in particular the purchase, resale and trade of identifiers or stolen information, as well as all types of dangerous behaviour (e.g. social engineering, ...), we will not accept or reward any report based on information whose source is not the result of failure on the part of our organization or one of our employees/service providers.

This excludes, but is not limited to:

• Stolen credentials gathered from unidentified sources
• Exposed credentials that are not applicable on the program’s scope
• Exposed GitHub/GitLab (or similar) instance with no direct relation with our program’s scope
• Exposed secrets (e.g. API tokens/keys or other technical credentials) that are not directly related to the program’s scope
• Exposed PII on an out-of-scope asset

To summarize our policy, you may refer to this table :

	Source of leak is in-scope	Source of leak belongs to our organization but is out-of-scope	Source of leak does not belong to our organization and is out-of-scope
Impact is in-scope (e.g. valid credentials on an in-scope asset)	Eligible	Eligible	Not Eligible
Impact is out-of-scope (e.g. valid credentials for an out-of-scope asset)	Eligible	Not Eligible	Not Eligible

Important precautions and limitations

As a complement to the Program’s rules and testing policy :

• DO NOT alter compromised accounts by creating, deleting or modifying any data
• DO NOT use compromised accounts to search for post-auth vulnerabilities (they won’t be eligible anyway)
• DO NOT include Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in your report and please REDACT/OBFUSCATE the PII that is part of your PoC (screenshot, server response, JSON file, etc.) as much as possible.
• In case of exposed credentials or secrets, limit yourself to verifying the credentials validity
• In case of sensitive information leak, DO NOT extract/copy every document or data that is exposed and limit yourself to describe and list what is exposed.

Please note that we may modify the terms of this program or terminate it at any time.