[n2d4]

> The severity of a bug isn't based on how it could theoretically affect people but on how it actually does

No, it's priced on demand and supply like anything else; bug bounties are priced to be the amount that Google thinks it takes to incentivise hunters to sell it to them, vs. to black hats.

[luismedel]

I know not everyone shares my world-view, but I need to be literally starving to consider selling whatever I discover to a criminal.

principles > wild market

[cookiengineer]

> principles > wild market

Your principles will be gone by the time the 10th company starts to sue you for a public disclosure you did in good faith.

There's a reason why nobody wants to use their real name and creates new aliases for every single CVE and report.

Principles are discrepancies with the law, they don't exist. If the law dictates a different principle than your own one, guess what, you'll be the one that is in jail.

Whistleblower protection laws are a bad joke, and politicians have no (financial) incentives to change that.

[Arnt]

Not going to name names, but someone I know was happy when his workplace was acquired by a bigger company from another country. He was the most senior developer, had done the heavy lifting, the product was did a good job for its happy users and the buyer would continue that, and last but not least, he'd be rich. Admittedly part of the agreement was a handshake, there had been so much to do, they'd worked insane amounts of overtime and some paperwork had been deferred…

He got nothing. No money at all. The CEO pretended to have forgotten every verbal agreement.

You only need to experience that kind of thing once to change your mind.

[kevindamm]

To change your mind about making sure everything is in writing in a binding contract?

[Arnt]

I'd guess most people would react in one of three ways, including that one. I can understand all three.

[graemep]

I think many people have internalised a purely profit driven world view, and it is what they expect to be the main motivator or themselves and others.

[TeMPOraL]

TL;DR: a random stranger is most likely a nice and honest and principled human being. A sufficiently large population of random strangers behaves approximately like a population of amoral(ish), rational(ish) economic actors. If your process involves continuously drawing a stranger at random from a population, then you can't avoid taking the economic view, because you eventually will draw a crazy or malevolent or economically-rational stranger.

--

GP wouldn't sell their discoveries to the criminals. But would they consider selling them to a third party as an intermediary, perhaps one that looks very much above board, and specializes in getting rewards from bug bounties in exchange for a percentage of payout?

I don't know if such companies exist, but I suspect they might - they exist for approximately everything else, it's a natural consequence of specialization and free markets.

Say GP would say yes; how much work would they put into vetting the third party doesn't double-dip selling the exploit on the black market? How can they be sure? Maybe there is a principled company out there, but we all know principled actors self-select out of the market over time.

Or, maybe GP wouldn't sell them unless starving, but what if agents of their government come and politely ask them to share, for the Good of their Country/People/Flag/Queen/Uniform/whatever?

Or, maybe GP wouldn't sell them unless starving, but what is their threshold of "starving"? For many, that wouldn't be literally starving, but some point on a spectrum between that and moderate quality-of-life drop. Like, idk, potentially losing their home, or (more US-specific I guess) random event leaving them with a stupidly high medical bill to pay, etc.

With all that in mind, the main question is: how do you know? How does Google know?

The reason people take an economic view of the world is because it's the only tool that lets you do useful analysis - but unlike with the proverbial hammer that makes everything look like a nail, at large enough scale, approximately everything behaves like a nail. Plus, most of the time, it only takes one.

GP may be principled, but there's likely[0] more than one person making the same discovery at the same time, and some of those people may not be as principled as GP. You can't rely on only ever dealing with principled people - like with a game of Russian roulette, if you pull the trigger enough times, you'll have a bad day.

--

[0] - Arguably, always. Real breakthrough leaps almost never happen, discoveries are usually very incremental - when all the pieces are there, many people end up noticing it and working on the next increment in parallel. The first one to publish is usually the only one to get the credit, though.

[n2d4]

But you probably wouldn't take the time to write up a nice report and send it to Google either if they didn't pay. Or even try to find the bug in the first place.

(But yea, I think lots of people would sell exploits to criminals for enough money.)

[worble]

Yeah I think this is the part that never gets mentioned. I'd like to think that most people wouldn't immediately go to selling on the black market, even if the pay is better it's just too risky if you get caught.

But if you don't pay people enough in the first place... then they're just going to spend their time doing other things that actually do pay and your bugs won't get caught except by those who are specifically trying to target you for illicit purposes.

[ndheebebe]

Not worth it. Because now you are in the underbelly.

[tomjen3]

I mean the alternative isn’t that you are selling it on the black market, it’s that you expose the issue in a blog post and the first time google knows is because one of their employees see the post here on hacker news.

You are essentially been paid to fill out forms and keep your mouth shut.

[throwaway48476]

This assumes efficient markets which doesn't exist when there is a monopoly on legitimate buyers. The value any one individual puts on a thing does not a market make.

[swexbe]

Is it really a amonopoly though if there are multiple companies offering bug bounties? If the whitehat feels he is underpaid he could just go look for bugs for another product.

[throwaway48476]

The market or lack thereof is for a product. That researchers can work on a different product is a market for labor.

[magic_hamster]

There's a clear cut between selling it to Google and selling it to black hats. White hats mostly have a career in cyber security and they will not disclose a vulnerability to a compromised party regardless of the price. Cyber security researchers will like having their name attached to a CVE or a fix in a well known open source project which is arguably worth more than 20K to them. If someone finds out you sold a vulnerability, or exploit, to a hostile party, your career is over.

[skriticos2]

Yea, legitimate with illegitimate is a weird kind of calculation, as the risk with illegitimate market is to end up in jail, and few people want to calculate the monetary value of lost time due to incareration and all the fallout that comes with it.

The more interesting question would be, if the bug bounty is enough to keep legitimate researchers engaged to investigate and document the threats. But..

The bug bounty itself is only a drop in the bucket for security companies, as it's a, unsteady and b, not enough to cover even trivial research environment cost.

Pratcially it's a nice monetary and reputation bonus (for having the name associated with the detection) in addition to the regular bussiness of providing baseline security intelligence, solutions and services to enterprises, which is what earns the regular paycheck.

Living from quests and bonties is more the realm of fantasy.

[ballenf]

Is it actually illegal to sell an exploit to the highest bidder? Obviously deploying or using the exploit violates any number of laws.

From a speech perspective, if I discovered an exploit and wrote a paper explaining it, what law prevents me from selling that research?

[kevindamm]

(I'm not a lawyer but) I think that would involve you in the conspiracy to commit the cybercrime, if you developed the exploit and sold it to an entity that used it with wrongful intent.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1029 gives the definition and penalties for committing fraud and/or unauthorized access, and it includes the development of such tools.

A lot of it includes the phrasing "with intent to defraud" so it may depend on whether the court can show you knew your highest bidder was going to use it in this way.

(apologies for citing US-centric law, I figured it was most relevant to the current discussion but things may vary by jurisdiction, though probably not by much)

[z3phyr]

You only risk prison if you sell it to the "bad guys" on the black market. Sell it to people who can jail the bad guys instead; that is, our governments.

[thrdbndndn]

I actually don't believe so.

Not everything is priced on demand and supply -- at least not strictly.

Of course the potential of abuse is part of the equation, but I think Google (or similar large companies) simply has a guideline of how the amount of the bounty is decided, than surveying the market to see what its "actual value" is. It's not exactly a free market, at least not on Google's side.

[n2d4]

I assure you that when Google set those bounties, they thought about how much they would have to pay white hats to make them do the right thing. Of course, it's a highly illiquid market (usually there's just one seller and only a handful of buyers), and so the pricing is super inefficient (hence based on guidelines and not surveying on every individual bug), but the logic remains.

[wslh]

> it's priced on demand and supply like anything else

You should complete the sentence: “It’s priced based on demand and supply in legal markets like anything else.”

There are, of course, other markets where things like this are traded, but that’s a different story. That said, I think the author is free to negotiate further with Google if they believe it’s worth it.