[ziddoap]

Shady thing happens -> Lucky enough for issue to go viral -> Company makes an apology mainly bragging about how much they've paid out on H1 and playing some blame game.

Count me not surprised.

A company that goes out of their way to dispute the CVE, to turn around a day after a PR firestorm, is not actually turning around. They are saving face.

[manfredo]

Or, the systems in place didn't work as intended and Valve took steps to rectify that. Sure it'd be better to get it right from the start, but people and organizations are fallible and the best thing to do is to make things right when they do fall.

[ziddoap]

This is not Valve's first time at the rodeo, and they aren't a small indie company learning the ropes.

The apology was loaded with blame shifting and bragging about previous H1 payments, neither of these lead me to be more lenient with Valve.

The hacker is still banned from submitting bugs, for god's sake. Nor has he heard from Valve.

Edit: They even disputed the CVE, manually, removing any doubt that this wasnt an oopsie caused by a system.

[manfredo]

"system" doesn't refer to hackerone, but rather Valve's bug bounty program in aggregate. It seems pretty clear to me that the root of this issue was failing to understand the scope of the vulnerability, leading to erroneous dispute of the CVE.

> We are also aware that the researcher who discovered the bugs was incorrectly turned away through our HackerOne bug bounty program, where his report was classified as out of scope. This was a mistake.

> Our HackerOne program rules were intended only to exclude reports of Steam being instructed to launch previously installed malware on a user’s machine as that local user. Instead, misinterpretation of the rules also led to the exclusion of a more serious attack that also performed local privilege escalation through Steam.

Valve seems to be pretty explicit about the fact that the issue was due to bad rules over what is and isn't in scope.

Un-banning the researcher is one HackerOne's end, isn't it?

[ziddoap]

>Valve seems to be pretty explicit about the fact that the issue was due to bad rules over what is and isn't in scope.

I could perhaps forgive a misunderstanding over fringe-cases or a company that is new to the H1 platform. However, we are talking about a LPE in this case, with a company who has themselves bragged about their familiarity with the platform. I would expect that they would spend some time checking their scope for something like LPE's and making sure it is crystal clear.

>Un-banning the researcher is one HackerOne's end, isn't it?

I was under the impression that each corporation running a bounty is in charge of allowing or disallowing users to their specific bounty, not H1. But to be fair, I'm not positive of this.

I understand you may think I'm being hard on Valve, but given how many computers the Steam Client is installed on, the age and size of the company, their familiarity with H1, their past responses to situations like this, not attempting to get in touch with the researcher they said it was a mistake to turn away (and there was a 2nd researcher turned away), and the half-hearted response - I simply can't understand making excuses for them. They should be held to a higher standard than Ma and Pa's coffee shop.

They do not appear to be acting in good faith, but rather trying to put out a fire and sweep it under the rug.

Edit:

To pile on, here is an open letter sent to Valve in 2014. This is not a new pattern for Valve.

https://steamdb.info/blog/valve-security-open-letter/

An excerpt:

"This letter is collaboratively written by various members of Steam’s developer community regarding our concerns with Valve security behaviours, in particular Valve’s inconsistency in rewarding those who report bugs (occasionally punishing people), the speed at which Valve addresses bug reports (if at all), and the problems users face attempting to report bugs to Valve"

[manfredo]

> I understand you may think I'm being hard on Valve, but given how many computers the Steam Client is installed on, the age and size of the company, their familiarity with H1, their past responses to situations like this, not attempting to get in touch with the researcher they said it was a mistake to turn away (and there was a 2nd researcher turned away), and the half-hearted response - I simply can't understand making excuses for them. They should be held to a higher standard than Ma and Pa's coffee shop.

This doesn't make sense. For the number of clients that have their software installed on their computes, Valve is a tiny company (~360 employees). I work in a 1000+ person company and we have only a fraction of the number of installed clients. We also don't know the volume of reports Valve is handling, and the ratio of spurious reports to genuine reports.

The open letter you link to talks about how Valve doesn't even have a bug bounty program at all - so I'm not sure how this is supposed to serve as evidence that Valve's bug bounty program is poorly managed. If anything, it shows that the company listened to criticism and subsequently established a bug bounty program. This is still an overall positive delta, even if their bug bounty program is less than ideal. And when they do make a mistake, they responded constructively to public criticism. I'm really at a loss as to why I'm supposed to see Valve as the villain here.

[ziddoap]

You cherry-pick a one-off example (# of clients) and ignore the rest. Feel free to remove that one if you don't think it is pertinent, and address the remainder of my comment.

You also cherry-picked the letter. Yes, 5 years after a history and pattern of security negligence, they are now able to repeat that pattern on H1. Hurray, positive delta.

Even if all issues have been addressed, the fact that it has happened in the past (many times) means that Valve deserves skepticism going forward. You a big fan of Facebook now that they deleted those cleartext passwords? They are cool now and anything else that comes to light must just be an oopsie, deserving of no scrutiny? Or are you skeptical because Facebook has a proven pattern of dishonesty? The same thing applies to Valve. They have a proven pattern.

>they responded constructively to public criticism Uhh, you'll have to link me to a constructive response of public criticism.

Since you cherry-picked one issue from the letter (which should still prove to show the pattern of bad behavior that, at the very least, used to exist), I will put a few others here:

>A few members of the developer community, and no doubt members of the community at large, have received infractions against their accounts for the discovery and disclosure of bugs – a subset of which are similar to those that have been rewarded with economy items.

>During this time we caught the occasional mention that Valve’s servers were indeed leaking sensitive information (such as partner session IDs, logins and cleartext passwords), however upon patching the bug Valve did not mandate a password reset.

>As a result, an unknown user changed a different app’s name up to three days after the servers were patched[4] – proving that Steam Partner credentials were indeed exposed and abused during Heartbleed.

I see bad security practices piled on bad practices piled onto a culture that spurns security.

>I'm really at a loss as to why I'm supposed to see Valve as the villain here.

I'm not telling you to look at them as a villain. I'm saying that perhaps, given a proven history of bad practices, it would be good to look at this situation with a skeptical eye (they are trying to save face, nothing else) rather than shrug it off as an "Oops! Haha, we didn't scope our bounty quite right!".

Obviously we don't see eye to eye on the subject.

I'll keep looking at Valve, with their repeated security blunders, with skepticism. Feel free to continue to chalk it all up to an oops.

Remember the whole "Trust takes a lifetime to build, and a second to destroy"? That's the heart of where I am coming from.