[oskarsv]

I wrote that exploit & report. Just some thoughts on comments here.

Sure the bounty is low, but ultimately it's their money and their decision. They will deal with the 'consequences' of others skipping their program and some public shaming.

I find everyone talking about black markets etc. kind of ridiculous. Really? You would sell something like this, so someone can be spied upon or maybe literally chopped to pieces? Jesus, not everything is about money - it was a fun challenge to chain it all together and I learned a lot from it.

The most outrageous part for me was the blog post I discovered by accident - it included no references or mentions (check archive.org). Both of the code snippets there are from my RCE reports. At the same time they were denying my requests for disclosure.

Of course, I understand that coordination mistakes like this happen, so I accept their apology and move on!

Evidence - original RCE video with huge CSS injection overlay: https://www.dropbox.com/s/11pv2ghdkw5g84b/css-rce-overlay.mo...

[krageon]

> You would sell something like this, so someone can be spied upon or maybe literally chopped to pieces? Jesus, not everything is about money

If you haven't had food for a few days everything is indeed about money. Either you reward someone properly for the work that they can do or they'll find someone else who does. I doubt most people get fuzzy warm feelings helping a big US corporation that's too greedy to actually pay independent researchers properly.

Edit: That's not to say your work wasn't cool btw. It's very admirable for you to view it the way you do.

[ufmace]

Technically true, but kind of ridiculous. How many people can't get food, but have a computer, electricity, internet connection, a reasonably quiet place to work, deep knowledge of web technology, and enough free time and mental energy to try to build exploits of computer software against an uncertain and distant bug bounty payout? If you're really desperate for food, you should be looking for a salaried position or something more immediate and certain.

More importantly, human history shows that ethics really are important. If you ignore ethics in the name of people starving, you build a society where even more people suffer and starve. If you want to build a society where everybody is safe and healthy, you need to pay attention to ethics now, not "someday".

[sillysaurusx]

Lots. Many more than you’d expect. To believe otherwise is privilege.

It took many years to understand this.

[ufmace]

Dude, if somebody out there somewhere is seriously doing that, they really need some education in effective careers to pursue. That's a lot more likely to improve their lives than complaints about the social effects of the size of bug bounty payouts.

Speaking of privilege, how much privilege is there in believing that ethics aren't important, because you don't know what it's like to live in a place that never even pretended to care about it, and get robbed on a routine basis, because a bunch of other people around you don't care about ethics either, and would rather form a gang and smash anybody who has something they want than work to build a marketable skill?

That is the world you build when you advocate for people not paying attention to the harms of releasing exploits into the wild, because it might pay better than doing the right thing.

[krageon]

I'm sure you didn't mean to but telling people who are doing the best they can with the tools that they have that they "really need some education" comes across as incredibly condescending. It's been my experience that you will have a hard time convincing other people if you tell them things that way.

[namdnay]

> If you haven't had food for a few days everything is indeed about money

I doubt anybody capable of finding an exploit like this is in that situation

[Barrin92]

I've met plenty of self-taught hackers in developing countries who were barely employed due to general economic dysfunction. Spend a month or two in Venezuela and you'll find plenty of qualified folks who have no steady job and are scraping by, how do you think people get into crime to begin with?

[respondo2134]

>> how do you think people get into crime to begin with?

lack of opportunity, lack of skills and lack of work ethic. As in it's easy to do, no barrier to entry and always availble.

Most crimes don't actually pay very well and have poor return if you've got any sort of marketable skills. Armed robbery of a bank will get you on average $1200 and 15-20 years.

[namdnay]

I would add poor impulse control

[Kaze404]

I suggest you try and peek outside your bubble then. Software Engineering isn't free money everywhere.

[namdnay]

You seem to be arguing against a straw man. Nobody said software engineering is free money, I said that a software engineer with the knowledge, skills and tools necessary to find an exploit like this is definitely not starving. In pretty much every country in the world, someone with those skills will be better off than 90% of the population

[krageon]

This is simply wrong. The fact that it is impossible for you to believe otherwise should inform you that you do indeed live inside a bubble.

[JoeCortopassi]

So many comments to this saying it's possible to be broke as a software developer. No one is arguing that. There are tons of people in every career path that don't make much due to a variety of reasons.

But pretending software development isn't a well paying career path, in general, is a statistically incorrect statement

[krageon]

I'm very capable of finding exploits in what can only be described as terrible living conditions and I've done so while being categorically incapable of finding food anywhere. That's not the environment I live in today (and I'm happy about it), but it really doesn't require a nice warm home with a stable internet connection to find some glaring holes in an application.

[devwastaken]

Most software is made entirely free with no source of income. The job market for software is terrible, and those people work entirely seperate jobs from it. Many program on a very minimum life expenditure.

[jariel]

"Most software is made entirely free with no source of income"

No. Most software that is actually used, is not made 'for free'.

[todd3834]

https://levels.fyi disagrees. I can confirm the offers on there are real

[trisiak]

That's very simplistic. Not everybody wants to work for US corporations or live in the US.

[todd3834]

Does that mean they automatically work for almost nothing? This is so different from what I’ve observed. I would love to see where people are getting this opinion from.

[vermilingua]

You replied to a claim about “most software” with a site that compares big tech companies, and only their US offices. The world is much bigger than your bubble.

[dang]

Please omit swipes like "your bubble" from HN comments. They're against the site guidelines because they degrade the container.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[todd3834]

Do you have any data the counters what I’m saying? I know people in other countries don’t make the same salaries but they are “mostly” doing pretty well for their region

[joering2]

> I doubt anybody capable of finding an exploit like this is in that situation

Yet the vast amount of hacks or attempts typically originate from China or North Korea...

[namdnay]

And? If they’re hacking for the DPRK they’re probably in the 1% most privileged of the country, they’re definitely not going to be the ones starving.

[jcims]

They can be when they try to live off of bug bounties alone.

There are a lot of young folks that try to make this their full time job after some success, then get into a dry spell. The panic robs them of the lateral thinking that brought them to the dance to begin with, and they get into spirals of ravenously hunting simple bugs that end up as dupes and out of scope.

[panpanna]

> They can be when they try to live off of bug bounties alone.

I think that's the problem. You shouldn't be entirely dependent on bounty money, because sooner or later you will find a bug that is worth 10x or 1000x on the black market.

I have seen white hat bounty hunters go rouge in such situations and entirely blame it on the cheap ass companies that won't offer the "right" amount.

Nobody owns you anything, you are doing this mostly for fun. The bounty is just a bonus.

[albntomat0]

> Nobody owns you anything, you are doing this mostly for fun. The bounty is just a bonus.

That's missing a key point of the bounty system. Slack and its users are better off that this bug was 1: discovered and 2: responsibly reported. The bounty increases the number of eyes looking, but also incentivizes folks to look into weird crashes or fight through the drudgery of triaging odd behavior.

The bug value also shows how much Slack here values their security, and makes me wary of them if I was in the place to be a customer of theirs.

[jcims]

> The bug value also shows how much Slack here values their security, and makes me wary of them if I was in the place to be a customer of theirs.

Most directly it shows how they value a bug bounty program. There are companies that spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year and have thousands of people in their infosec program that don’t have bug bounty programs.

You can extrapolate that to how they value security but that’s not necessarily directly correlated.

[jcims]

Totally agree with you. I’m waiting for this to start going the way of Uber.

[geofft]

If you haven't had food in a few days, there are many better ways to get food on the table than trying to find exploitable vulnerabilities and sell them for tens of thousands of dollars, including

- Work on a bounty program that rewards mitigations instead of exploits (e.g., https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/patch-rewards/). Those are much more deterministic. (But there's no black market for them.)

- Get a conventional job (possibly in software, possibly not), which pays you on a schedule.

I get the argument you're making about money, but I'm having trouble believing that going after bug bounties ever makes sense to someone in that situation, given how non-deterministic it is to find a bug.

Also (as this bug shows), it typically takes a long time between reporting a bug and having the responding team decide that it merits a bounty. In this case it took a month. (And then there's logistics about actually getting you the money at that point.) Are people who haven't eaten for a few days really going to be happy not eating for another month, even if they get a hundred thousand dollars then?

[krageon]

Are you seriously telling people who are starving to "get a [conventional or not] job"? I'm struggling to understand your point of view, this is almost a caricature.

[jcims]

I'm fairly certain that everyone in the vicinity of a bug bounty program is aware that interest in a program can be dialed up by simply adjusting award amounts. If you look here, Slack just recently increased theirs:

https://hackerone.com/slack/bounty_table_versions?type=team&...

[securitron]

> I find everyone talking about black markets etc. kind of ridiculous. Really? You would sell something like this, so someone can be spied upon or maybe literally chopped to pieces?

I work with some security engineers who in previous jobs used to write exploits for the highest bidder. Their stuff ended up being used for exactly this. One of them even told me quite proudly, you know that exploit that was in the news, that was mine.

The lack of any ethical framework other than "I want to make as much money as possible" viscerally disgusts me. And there is far too much of this in our industry, it's rife with this sort of ingrained dollar-chasing selfishness with not a care of the consequences.

Good on you for taking a positive ethical stand against this. It's very refreshing to hear.

[cutemonster]

> being used for exactly this

That refers to "spied upon" or sth like "chopped to pieces"?

In which continent?

[kamyarg]

I really hope they amend the bounty paid to actually compensate you for the find.

As a slack user, seeing them pay < $2K for RCE report does not make me feel safe. Next person finding something similar might be looking into this and saying "$3K? no thank you, I take the risk of getting caught but being paid fairly."

To be clear I am not advocating for this, but it makes me concerned as a user "some people" will be more likely to do it.

[SXX]

The point is: you don't really need black market or doing anything illegal to being paid fairly for such research. There are plenty of absolutely legal security companies that will pay you 10x for exploit like that and then just gonna sell it to highest bidder (read: all kind of government entities).

And yeah those companies in term work for 3-letter agencies and foreign governments. Of course many would consider selling to them unethical, but that would be absolutely legal.

[albntomat0]

Another likely outcome is that folks aren't going to look at all, or only at a surface level. This leaves low hanging bugs for those with malicious intent to find easily.

[outime]

I haven't said anything about black markets but:

>You would sell something like this, so someone can be spied upon or maybe literally chopped to pieces? Jesus, not everything is about money

Not me, not you, but many people make it all about money. I don't think it's ridiculous to think that people can have absolutely zero ethics.

[oskarsv]

Sure, absolutely they exist. But in my opinion they are the absolute minority. I've been in security for long enough to know that most people are good, otherwise we'd have major problems every day.

99% of people saying something about black markets or govt agencies have never really faced this decision or thought about it for more than 5 minutes. So it was a question - have you REALLY thought about it?

[klyrs]

I'd hypothesize that people are more willing to entertain the profiteering fantasy when they aren't realistically facing the consequences. Also, that people are more willing to be jerks under cloak of anonymity. As you note, perhaps only 1% of people with the drive to find these sploits are going to do something bad with them. That means the extra volume is folks who wish they had such a product to sell on the black market are just jealous wannabes. You can ignore them.

[SXX]

I haven't done any security research for decade, but it was my hobby long ago. While it's not true in every case sometimes finding worthy bug and then successfully exploiting it can literally take weeks of work. Like 14 hours a day work with break for sleep in attempt to solve some puzzle. Usually without any payoff.

This is profession where your actual skills mean very little until you do something exceptional to have portfolio or become famous some other way. It's very easy to talk about ethics for people who live in western countries and have easy access to well-paid jobs, but a lot of people didn't have such options.

I don't try to justify actual criminals here, but don't be surprised when people sell 0-days to some Israeli companies or NSA-contractors.

[oskarsv]

I don't live in a 'western country' nor do I make anything near a Silicon Valley salary

[SXX]

Then I can just state huge respect to your moral standards and hope you getting paid well enough to continue doing what you do.

There still are a lot of people who are not gonna be okay with said situation for long. Anyone can get more cynical and cruel / indifferent with age due to bad experiences: not getting paid well for reported issues, being cheated or getting into legal trouble for "doing the right thing". Some of us really love security research and want to make it their profession, but it's really easy to end up both without stable income or in some kind of trouble.

So I think it's important to raise awareness about it in developer community since many people don't understand how much effort is going into being white hat. It's just like the story with OpenSSL before Heartbleed: half of the world used software, but there wasn't even enough funding to pay properly even for single developer.

[hartator]

Read your report and the way you handled things both on technical and human perspective was perfect. Sorry that they made it so difficult to disclose. We are hiring if you ever need a job! https://serpapi.com/team

[oskarsv]

thank you, appreciate some positivity :)

[hartator]

It’s well deserved! :) Feel to email me directly if you have any question. julien _at_ serpapi.com

[fouc]

Out of curiosity, what do you feel a competitive bug bounty would be for this type of report?

It would be interesting if security reporters had a habit of ending their reports with what they feel is the fair market rate.

[oskarsv]

high 4, low 5 figures

depends on exploit, program, company etc

[rblatz]

In my opinion about 10k feels right for this one.

[Mandatum]

I'm so sorry this happened, the CSO reached out and acknowledged the issue which was.. The minimum, but I'd be doing an internal RCA at Slack for how that post made it public without any acknowledgement.

Just sucks - marketing, legal, the engineer and peers who reviewed it, security..

[vmception]

> Sure the bounty is low, but ultimately it's their money and their decision.

Uh lol.

Bug bounties gravitate to their market value by showing companies how valuable they actually are and forcing them to learn.

[ActorNightly]

Do you have more info on the javascript piece? I cant find docs for those object properties like delegate anywhere

[oskarsv]

The app has been updated multiple times since, but you can debug Slack and other Electron apps to see the context they are running with. Electron apps merge desktop functionality with web and sometimes it's possible to find abusable functions - e.g. filesystem, leaking dangerous Electron objects etc.

In this case it was possible to abuse lack of context isolation to overwrite functionality (first part of the JS exploit). This changed function behaviour to return (leak) a BrowserWindow class (https://www.electronjs.org/docs/api/browser-window) when calling window.open(). A BrowserWindow class allows to instantiate a new window with your own security settings :)

Some of the current non-standard functions in Slack: https://imgur.com/a/OSjS0kJ

More info: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/security

[make3]

your response wrt black markets strikes me as incredibly naive knowing all the crime, murder, gross negligence causing death and corruption there is and has been literally everywhere on the planet, since forever, for money

[Voliokis]

Unfortunately, we live in a world governed by money as a motivator. While you might not be in it for the money, many people are, to a certain degree (you know, to make a living and to be able to afford a decent life). If companies are unwilling to pay anything remotely close to what researchers' time is worth, then they shouldn't wonder when people prefer to sell the exploits that they find to those who do value their work appropriately.

And frankly, we shouldn't be giving companies a pass for being cheap because "reporting it responsibly" is the right thing to do. These companies are benefiting to a great degree by offloading vital security research onto unaffiliated and unknown third-parties. Your time, as well as the time of any other hacker or researcher, is valuable and needs to be compensated. I don't see why it's fair to any of us that we should have to work for free or for low pay-outs just because we might be doing the right thing. Same goes for any other career that is badly paid just because "they're helping people".

[oskarsv]

I agree with you. It's super low, but I and others will just ignore it in the future and ultimately they lose.

However, bug bounties are not a job. Nobody is forced or obligated to do anything. I'm giving them 'a pass' in the future :) It's great people are discussing this and surely it will improve things for future researchers.

I consider bug bounties like competitions. The 'prize money' is defined beforehand. You don't have to compete if you don't want it. You can also compete for the 'notoriety'. Knowing the stakes, do you complain after getting 'first place'?

Everything you own or do is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it, everything else is just speculation.

[fancythat]

In my country there is a sort of obligation to get 10% of value in case you find something valuable but is more applied to found money. Many times people just return what they have found without taking any reward. This could be extrapolated to bug bounties as well. How much would Slack or its clients potentially loose, if this bug was exploited? I think that everybody could agree on some sum, lets say 200k USD. In that case 20k should be paid.

Another approach is to take invoice for last security audit and simply pay the whole amount of that invoice to the researcher. If none was ever done (good God!), just some usual quote for pen testing the targeted application could be applied.

HackerOne could also enforce minimum payouts per exploit category.

[hashkb]

What you do, though, is objectively more valuable to Slack than you were paid. They have reframed security as the competition you mention, but the stakes are much higher and they're sidestepping with this issue of "responsible reporting".

[chrisseaton]

> What you do, though, is objectively more valuable to Slack than you were paid.

This is a meaningless statement.

Obviously all work is more valuable to the company than what they pay you to do the work... otherwise they wouldn't pay you would they? Because they'd get nothing out of it.

If your work generates £5 for a company, then why would they pay you £5 or £6 for it? What's in it for them?

[weswpg]

Obviously the point is that the gap between how much the person deserves and how much they're paid is particularly significant in this case

[IncRnd]

Payments from a company are subjective not objective. There is a single purchaser, in this case Slack, and the researcher already said that he wouldn't engage in unethical behaviour to make more money. Just sell the vulnerability to Slack, and be done with it.

Business owners of failing businesses, when they go to sell, many times think, "I've put in a million hours for this, so I need a million dollars." But, that will never happen.

[Voliokis]

> However, bug bounties are not a job. Nobody is forced or obligated to do anything. I'm giving them 'a pass' in the future :) It's great people are discussing this and surely it will improve things for future researchers.

Shouldn't people like you be able to do this for a living if you want to? It's valuable work. It has real market value. It seems like you're doing this for fun and genuine interest and I do admire that. Maybe you don't want to taint your motivation with the idea of "how much money can I get for this?" I get that too. But as an outsider, I see this low pay-out and I see exploitation under the guise of "doing the right thing". I genuinely want you to be paid more. You deserve it.

I feel like the only way this kind of thing will change is if people are more vocal about how inappropriate the low compensation is for a company like Slack. Public criticism is necessary and, unfortunately, the only tool we have nowadays to effect change. I understand if this isn't a hill you want to die on, but I hope that other people (particularly people who aren't in bug hunting) are willing to pressure Slack to reconsider its policies.

The problem with "others will ignore it in the future and ultimately they lose" is that it's a passive signal that is too easily overlooked and ignored. It never reaches anybody with any kind of influence who can make changes. If a big exploit happens and somebody does a root cause analysis, it's never going to lead to the conclusion that "well, it's because we haven't been paying enough in our bug bounty program, we need to change that", if only because there's no data about how many people passed on helping them out because of the low payouts.

[oskarsv]

Yes they should and I think I could. This exploit was more of a fun challenge.

I support and agree to everything you are saying. I love the community response. I too loathe the bug bounty asymmetry in power between corporations and reporters, but it exists.. by design. How do you imagine a researcher can 'demand' more money in this situation? They can choose the amounts arbitrarily and there is nothing legal or ethical you can do about it.

I haven't seen any proposals for real solutions - how would you ask this? How do you decide the amount for each company? Solutions, which do not bypass ethics or laws. I hope that 'the market' will solve this eventually and I think I at least raised awareness.

[panpanna]

How much time did you spend on this?

Would you have done without excepting any rewards, i.e. just for fun?

[oskarsv]

Context matters. In this case it was a challenge because of previous research and I would've done it just for fun and the experience. I'm lucky I can afford to do that. Doesn't mean I don't value compensation.

In other cases maybe yes, maybe no - for some nonprofit, maybe someone needs help? are they a business and can they afford to compensate this kind of work? maybe it is some prominent product? there is no simple answer

[tptacek]

Vulnerability researchers with track records make more than software developers do. This whole thread is pretty weird.

[Wowfunhappy]

So, what is the right thing to do if you find a vulnerability in Slack?

[kevingadd]

There are western vulnerability brokers that sell advance warning of exploits to clients like large corporations and governments so they can protect themselves, then presumably handle notifying the company in question so the bug can get fixed. Of course, one problem is that their clients are free to abuse the exploits, and another problem is there's no guarantee they'll make sure the exploits get fixed... but that's certainly an option for you if you aren't comfortable using HackerOne.

Another option is to just disclose it to the public a set number of days after notifying them, like Project Zero.

[albntomat0]

I think the key thing is that there's a wide range in the amount of effort someone will put into looking for bugs/exploits, guided by a number of factors, like how fun the bug is to work on, the monetary reward, and any prestige from being the one to find it.

If an obvious vuln appears, obviously report it. But, these reports require a lot of work. It'd also be perfectly ok if the researcher reported whatever obscure behaviour they found initially, and went to go look at other targets with better bounties, played with their dog, etc.

[kevin_b_er]

Open disclosure on day 0 it would seem.

[Voliokis]

This might be unpopular, but if you don't feel like the compensation adequately reflects your effort, then you're free to do whatever you think is fair. It's your work. Slack isn't entitled to that work. Ideally, you'd check beforehand what a bug bounty program usually pays out and then decide whether to work on some other company's product that pays better. But you're always going to have people who are interested in doing this stuff and you're always going to have people who will look for the best pay-out for the work they've done.

The problem with starting with the baseline of "the right thing to do is always to disclose the vulnerability to Slack regardless of how little they pay" is that it perpetuates the exploitation of legitimate and important work by skilled workers. The onus should be on Slack to provide fair compensation, not on people doing this important work to "do it out of the good of their hearts".

Slack as a company had a revenue of $401 million last year and the average payout in their bug bounty program is $1376 (https://github.blog/2018-03-14-four-years-of-bug-bounty/). That's just disgusting.

[Wowfunhappy]

> Slack isn't entitled to that work.

Sure, but that isn’t the user’s fault, and they’re the ones who are going to get attacked. I don’t disagree with your other points but I don’t think selling an exploit on the black market is the right solution.

Perhaps the best compromise, as I think about it, is to just make the exploit public with no prior warning to the vendor. That’s not great for users either, but at least they’re informed, and the vendor will be left scrambling. But in that case, the researcher gets paid nothing at all.

[tjbecker]

> Sure, but that isn’t the user’s fault, and they’re the ones who are going to get attacked.

This is true, but the responsibility to protect these users is ultimately on Slack, not the researcher. If Slack's bounties are nowhere near competitive with black market prices, they are failing to protect their users and should be called out on it.

[panpanna]

> whatever you think is fair

Please give us some examples of what you would consider fair in this situation.

[tpxl]

Hours worked for the exploit * 50$ should be enough.

[bawolff]

That's silly.

If someone spends 100 hours coming up with, say a clickjacking vuln, it does not magically make it worth $5000. If someone spends 6 minutes coming up with zero-click sandbox bypass in chrome, its not just worth $5.

Severity matters not time, especially in a bug bounty. If you want the stability (and assurance) of actually getting paid reasonsbly and consistently for this you should get a job as a pentester.

[rubber_duck]

That's kind bad - first of all 50$ can be really low depending on the region, but more importantly this disregards the time spend on looking for exploits that don't pan out.

So I would multiply that 50$ by at least 4.

But still like the other said bugs should pay by severity not by time spent.

[IncRnd]

The researcher would probably get paid even less, if that is the case.

The value of an exploit has nothing to do with the development time.

[albntomat0]

> I find everyone talking about black markets etc. kind of ridiculous. Really? You would sell something like this, so someone can be spied upon or maybe literally chopped to pieces? Jesus, not everything is about money - it was a fun challenge to chain it all together and I learned a lot from it.

Slack is directly taking advantage of that being the only alternative. You can do whatever you want with the money. However, having a robust bug bounty program ensures a wide range of people are both willing and able to look for and report vulnerabilities. This needs to be a requirement for any large successful company handling a large amount of user data. Slack can definitely afford it, and this can be used against them the next time they report a breach.