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Other than bad press there's no immediate incentive for the company to avoid stiffing researchers. Bug bounty programs work if the company is vulnerable to bad
by akira2501 2y ago
Other than bad press there's no immediate incentive for the company to avoid stiffing researchers. Bug bounty programs work if the company is vulnerable to bad press and it would actually impact their bottom line.
This is not from an examination of when bug programs work but when they have very demonstrably not worked in the past.
- tptacek 2y agoPress is a perfect example of incentive alignment in these programs, since not paying a bounty a researcher believes is deserved is practically a guarantee of an uncharitable blog post.
- LegionMammal978 2y agoWhich process ensures that the company should actually care in the slightest about an uncharitable blog post or two, especially when its motivations are opaque enough that the lack of payment might be chalked up to "there's a good reason for that"? If the cost of an uncharitable blog post is less than the cost of paying out the bounty, then a company would still be incentivized to find as many reasons to reject a payout as possible, as long as future reporters still believe they have a good chance of receiving a payout (e.g., if they believe they can sideskirt any rejection reasons).
- tptacek 2y agoThe cost of an uncharitable blog post is massively more than the price of a bounty, like, it's not even close. The cost of an uncharitable blog post is potentially unbounded (as in: not many people in a large tech company would know how to put a ceiling on the cost), and the cost of a bounty, even a high one, is more or less chump change. Another in my long-running dramatic series "businesses pay spectacularly more for determinism and predictability than nerds like us account for".
- LegionMammal978 2y ago> The cost of an uncharitable blog post is potentially unbounded (as in: not many people in a large tech company would know how to put a ceiling on the cost), and the cost of a bounty, even a high one, is more or less chump change. Look up "apple bug bounty" on Google, or any other search engine of your choice, and you'll find absolutely no shortage of people complaining of issues with the program. If these complaints each cost Apple a bajillion dollars, then why haven't they shut down their program already? Or, if almost all of those complaints are just from the reporter being dumb, then how are potential future reporters (who would care about the company's prospenity to pay) supposed to find actual meaningful complaints among the noise? I don't think that sporadic blog posts are nearly as powerful as you're making them out to me: my intuition tells me that the company can usually ignore them safely, short of them making front-page news.
- tptacek 2y agoLook, I believe you, but people complain about all these bounty programs, some of which I know to have been extraordinarily well managed, and usually when you get to the bottom of those complaints it comes down to a misapprehension the researchers have about what the bounty program is doing and what its internal constraints are. I acknowledge that another possibility is that the bounty program itself isn't performing well; that is a possibility (I have no actual knowledge about this particular case!) The only thing here I'm going to push back on, and forcefully, is the idea that bounty programs have an incentive to stiff researchers. They do not. I cannot emphasize enough how "not real money" these sums are. Bounty program operators, the people staffing these programs, don't get measured on how few bounties they pay out.
- LegionMammal978 2y agoMy point is that while the sums might be "not real money", the costs of stiffing researchers is even moreso "not real money", so that it makes sense on the margin to do it, whenever the situation isn't incredibly clear-cut. After all, it's not like Apple goes around handing out free iPhones on the street, even though a few thousand units are similarly "not real money". Businesses care about small effects on the margin.
- planetpluta 2y agoMaybe not “immediate” but withholding rewards results in fewer researchers participating in bounty programs which defeats the purpose.