Vulnerability Disclosure Policy

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is committed to maintaining the security of our systems and protecting sensitive information from unauthorized disclosure.

This policy describes what systems and types of security 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.

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 we will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research.

Guidelines

Under this policy, “research” means activities in which you:

• Notify us as soon as possible after the discovery of 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.
• Provide a reasonable amount of time to resolve the issue before you disclose it publicly.
• Disclose vulnerability information except as set forth in the ‘Reporting a Vulnerability’ and ‘Disclosure’ sections below.

Once it is established that a vulnerability exists or encounter, any sensitive data (including personally identifiable information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), testing must be stopped, notify NEA immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.

Test Methods

Security researchers must not:

• Test any system other than the systems set forth in the ‘Scope’ section below.
• Engage in physical testing of facilities or resources;
• Engage in social engineering;
• Send unsolicited electronic mail to NEA users, including “phishing” messages;
• Execute or attempt to execute “Denial of Service” or “Resource Exhaustion” attacks;
• Introduce malicious software;
• Test in a manner which could degrade the operation of NEA systems; or intentionally impair, disrupt, or disable NEA systems;
• Test third-party applications, websites, or services that integrate with or link to or from NEA systems;
• Delete, alter, share, retain, or destroy NEA data, or render NEA data inaccessible; or
• Use an exploit to exfiltrate data, establish command line access, establish a persistent presence on NEA systems, or “pivot” to other NEA systems.

Security researchers must:

• Cease testing and notify us immediately upon discovery of a vulnerability,
• Cease testing and notify us immediately upon discovery of an exposure of nonpublic data, and,
• Purge any stored NEA nonpublic data upon reporting a vulnerability.

Security researchers may:

• View or store NEA nonpublic data only to the extent necessary to document the presence of a potential vulnerability.

Scope
This Policy applies to the following systems and services:

• *.arts.gov
• *.nea.gov

Any services not explicitly listed above are excluded from scope. Additionally, vulnerabilities found in non-federal systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to its disclosure policy (if any).

Reporting a Vulnerability

Reports should provide a detailed technical description of the steps required to reproduce the vulnerability, including a description of any tools needed to identify or exploit the vulnerability. Images, e.g., screen captures, and other documents may be attached to reports. It is helpful to give attachments illustrative names. Reports may include proof-of-concept code that demonstrates exploitation of the vulnerability. We request that any scripts or exploit code be embedded into non-executable file types. We can process all common file types, and also file archives including zip, 7-zip, and gzip.

Researchers may submit reports anonymously or provide contact information, and any preferred methods or times of day to communicate, as they see fit. We may contact researchers to clarify reported vulnerability information or other technical interchange.

By submitting a report to the NEA, researchers warrant that the report and any attachments do not violate the intellectual property rights of any third party and the submitter grants the NEA a non-exclusive, royalty-free, world-wide, perpetual license to use, reproduce, create derivative works, and publish the report and any attachments.

We encourage researchers to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities identified in NEA systems. For reports submitted in compliance with this policy and the researcher choose to share your contact information, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible:

• The NEA will acknowledge receipt within three business days of receiving the report.
• Validate submissions, implement corrective actions if appropriate, and inform researchers of the disposition of reported vulnerabilities.
• NEA does not provide payment to reporters and thus, reporters waive any claims to compensation when submitting vulnerabilities to NEA.

Reports are accepted via electronic mail at security@arts.gov. Acceptable message formats are plain text, rich text, and HTML.

Disclosure

The NEA is committed to timely correction of vulnerabilities. However, we recognize that public disclosure of a vulnerability in absence of a readily-available corrective action likely increases versus decreases risk. Accordingly, we require that you refrain from sharing information about discovered vulnerabilities for 90 calendar days after you have received our acknowledgement of receipt of your report. If you believe others should be informed of the vulnerability prior to our implementation of corrective actions, we require that you coordinate with us in advance.

We may share vulnerability reports with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), as well as any affected vendors. We will not share names or contact data of security researchers unless given explicit permission.

Questions

The NEA encourages security researchers to contact us for clarification on any element of this policy. Please contact us prior to conducting research if you are unsure if a specific test method is inconsistent with or unaddressed by this policy. We also invite security researchers to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.

Questions regarding this policy may be sent to Security@arts.gov.