Vulnerability Disclosure Policy

Introduction

The Office of Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation (ONHIR) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information from unwarranted disclosure. 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 want security researchers to feel comfortable reporting vulnerabilities they’ve discovered – as set out in this policy – so we can fix them and keep our users safe. We have developed this policy to reflect our values and uphold our sense of responsibility to security researchers who share their expertise with us in good faith.

Guidelines

We request that you:

• Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.
• Provide us a reasonable amount of time to resolve the issue before you disclose it publicly.
• 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 command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to “pivot” to other systems.
• Once you’ve 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), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.
• Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.

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

Scope

This policy applies to the following systems and services:

Any system within the ONHIR.GOV domain

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 non-federal 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 or endpoint is in scope or not, contact us at security@onhir.gov before starting your research or at the security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS.

We ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems 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.

Vulnerability reporters will not receive payment for submitting vulnerabilities to ONHIR and that by submitting, reporters waive any claims to compensation.

Types of testing

The following test types are not authorized:

• Network denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests
• Physical testing (e.g. office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing

Reporting a vulnerability

Information submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities.

We accept vulnerability reports at via security@onhir.gov. Reports may be submitted anonymously.

We will acknowledge receipt of your report within 3 business days.

We do not support PGP-encrypted emails at this time. For particularly sensitive information, submit security@onhir.gov.

What we would like to see from you

To help ONHIR triage and prioritize submissions, it is recommended that the researcher’s reports are prepared in the following manner:

• 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 a researcher chooses to share your contact information with ONHIR, ONHIR is committed to coordinating with the researcher as openly and as quickly as possible.

• Within 3 business days, ONHIR will acknowledge that a report has been received.
• To the best of our ability, ONHIR will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to the researcher 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.
• OHNIR will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.