Vulnerability Disclosure Policy
Introduction
Avatara is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. 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 us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.
We encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems.
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 Avatara 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
- Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.
- 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 persistent command line access, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.
- Provide us a reasonable amount of time to resolve the issue before you disclose it publicly.
- Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.
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
- Social engineering or phishing
- Physical attacks
- Attempts to modify or destroy data
- Clickjacking
- Attempt to brute force passwords
- Accessing or attempting to access accounts or data that does not belong to you
- Any activity that violates a law
- Posting, transmitting, uploading, linking to, or sending any malware
- Automated vulnerability scan reports
- Leveraging deceptive techniques
- Exfiltrating data under any circumstances
- Testing third-party websites, applications, or services that integrate with services or products
- Disclosure of known public files or directories
- Lack of Secure or HTTP Only flags on non-sensitive cookies
- Using a known vulnerable library or framework without valid attack scenario
Scope
Our Vulnerability Disclosure Program covers any:
- Product or service owned by Avatara that you have legal access to, and
- Product, service and infrastructure we provide to shared service partners that you have legal access to.
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 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 aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at reports@avataraplatform.com before starting your research.
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 document. 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 Avatara, 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 via emails to reports@avataraplatform.com. Reports may be submitted anonymously. If you share contact information, we will acknowledge receipt of your report within 3 business days.
What we would like to see from you
In order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:
- Describe the location the vulnerability 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).
- Be in English, if possible.
What you can expect from us
When you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.
- Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.
- To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.
- We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.
Questions
Questions regarding this policy may be sent to reports@avataraplatform.com. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.
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