VULNERABILITY DISCLOSURE POLICY

Introduction

The United States African Development Foundation (USADF) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information from unwarranted disclosure. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear 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 USADF vulnerability reports, and how long USADF ask’s security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.

USADF wants security researchers to feel comfortable reporting vulnerabilities they have discovered – as set out in this policy – so we can fix them and keep our users safe. We have developed this policy to reflect our values and uphold our sense of responsibility to security researchers who share their expertise with us in good faith.

Authorization

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 the issue quickly, and USADF 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.

Guidelines

We request that you:

  • Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.
  • Provide us a reasonable amount of time to resolve the issue before you disclose it publicly.
  • 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.
  • Once you have 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.
  • Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports – data and information must be tangible.

Test methods

The following test methods are not authorized:

  • Network denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data.
  • Physical testing (e.g., office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g., phishing,), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing.
  • Full red-team penetration testing that involves unauthorized access to our servers.

Scope

This policy applies to the following URLs, 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 non-federal systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy, if any. If you are not sure whether a system or endpoint is in scope or not, contact us at secincidents@usadf.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 policy. 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.

Reporting a vulnerability

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 USADF, 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 using this form or via secincidents@usadf.gov. Reports may be submitted anonymously. We will acknowledge receipt of your report within three (3) business days. We do not support PGP-encrypted emails at this time. For particularly sensitive information, submit through our HTTPS Web Form.

What we would like to see from you

This Vulnerability Disclosure Policy sets out expectations when working with good-faith testers, as well as what to expect from USADF. To encourage good-faith security testing and disclosure of discovered vulnerabilities, as wells as assist with the triaging and prioritization of submissions, we recommend that your reports:

  • Make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations and disruptions to others, including, but not limited to, unauthorized access to or destruction of data and interruption or degradation of our services.
  • Do not exploit a security issue you discover for any reason. This includes demonstrating additional risk, such as attempted compromise of sensitive company data or probing for additional issues.
  • Do not intentionally violate any other laws or regulations, including, but not limited to, laws and regulations prohibiting the unauthorized access to data.
  • If contributors inadvertently cause a privacy violation or disruption (such as accessing account data, service configurations, or other confidential information) while investigating an issue, data is prohibited from being saved, stored, transferred, or otherwise further accessed after initial discovery. You shall notify USADF of such privacy violation or disruption as soon as possible. A written description of the vulnerability or a screenshot demonstrating the existence of the vulnerability may need to serve as an acceptable form of proof. 
  • Describe the vulnerability, where it was discovered, and the potential impact of exploitation.
  • Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots are helpful).
  • Provide this description/information in English, if possible.

Questions

Questions regarding this policy may be sent to security@usadf.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.