GitHub Security Bug Bounty

Software security researchers are increasingly engaging with internet companies to hunt down vulnerabilities. Our bounty program gives a tip of the hat to these researchers and provides rewards of $30,000 or more for critical vulnerabilities.

You can find more information in our rules, scope, targets, and FAQ sections. You can also check the current rankings on the leaderboard.

Happy hacking!

Rules

Before you start

• Check the list of domains that are in scope for the Bug Bounty program and the list of targets for useful information for getting started.

• Check the list of bugs that have been classified as ineligible. Submissions which are ineligible will likely be closed as Not Applicable.

• Check the GitHub Changelog for recently launched features.

• Never attempt non-technical attacks such as social engineering, phishing, or physical attacks against our employees, users, or infrastructure.

• When in doubt, contact us at bounty@github.com.

• By participating in GitHub's Bug Bounty program (the "Program"), you acknowledge that you have read and agree to GitHub's Terms of Service as well as the following:

• you are not currently a GitHub employee or contractor, were not a GitHub employee or contractor within six months prior to submission, and you did not collaborate on your submission with anyone who was.

• your participation in the Program will not violate any law applicable to you, or disrupt or compromise any data that is not your own.

• you are solely responsible for any applicable taxes, withholding or otherwise, arising from or relating to your participation in the Program, including from any bounty payments.

• GitHub reserves the right to terminate or discontinue the Program at its discretion.

• Only test for vulnerabilities on sites you know to be operated by GitHub and are in-scope. Some sites hosted on subdomains of GitHub.com are operated by third parties and should not be tested.

• We cannot reward any individual on any U.S. sanctions list, or any individual residing in any U.S.-sanctioned country or region. For more information, please see https://www.hackerone.com/disclosure-guidelines.

Legal safe harbor

Your research is covered by the GitHub Bug Bounty Program Legal Safe Harbor policy. In summary:

• We consider security research and vulnerability disclosure activities conducted consistent with this policy as “authorized” conduct under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the DMCA, and other applicable computer use laws such as Cal. Penal Code 502(c). We waive any potential DMCA claim against you for circumventing the technological measures we have used to protect the applications in this bug bounty program's scope.

• We want you to coordinate disclosure through our bug bounty program, and don't want researchers put in fear of legal consequences because of their good faith attempts to comply with our bug bounty policy. We cannot bind any third party, so do not assume this protection extends to any third party. If in doubt, ask us before engaging in any specific action you think might go outside the bounds of our policy.

• Because both identifying and non-identifying information can put a researcher at risk, we limit what we share with third parties. We may provide non-identifying substantive information from your report to an affected third party, but only after notifying you and receiving a commitment that the third party will not pursue legal action against you. We will only share identifying information (name, email address, phone number, etc.) with a third party if you give your written permission.

• If your security research as part of the bug bounty program violates certain restrictions in our site policies, the safe harbor terms permit a limited exemption.

Performing your research

• Do not impact other users with your testing, this includes testing vulnerabilities in repositories or organizations you do not own. If you are attempting to find an authorization bypass, you must use accounts you own.

• The following are never allowed and are ineligible for reward. We may suspend your GitHub account and ban your IP address for:

• Performing distributed denial of service (DDoS) or other volumetric attacks

• Spamming content

• Large-scale vulnerability scanners, scrapers, or automated tools which produce excessive amounts of traffic.

  • Note: We do allow the use of automated tools so long as they do not produce excessive amounts of traffic. For example, running one nmap scan against one host is allowed, but sending 65,000 requests in two minutes using Burp Suite Intruder is excessive.

• Researching denial-of-service attacks is allowed and eligible for rewards only if you follow these rules:

• There are no limits for researching denial of service vulnerabilities against your own instance of GitHub Enterprise Server. We strongly recommend/prefer this method for researching denial of service issues.

• If you choose to test on GitHub proper (i.e. https://github.com)
  • Research must be performed in organizations or repositories you own
  • Stop immediately if you believe you have affected the availability of our services. Don't worry about demonstrating the full impact of your vulnerability, GitHub's security team will be able to determine the impact.

Handling personally identifiable information (PII)

• Personally identifying information (PII) includes:
• legal and/or full names
• names or usernames combined with other identifiers like phone numbers or email addresses
• health or financial information (including insurance information, social security numbers, etc.)
• information about political or religious affiliations

• information about race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, or other identifying information that could be used for discriminatory purposes

• Do not intentionally access others' PII. If you suspect a service provides access to PII, limit queries to your own personal information.

• Report the vulnerability immediately and do not attempt to access any other data. The GitHub Security team will assess the scope and impact of the PII exposure.

• Limit the amount of data returned from services. For SQL injection, for example, limit the number of rows returned

• You must delete all your local, stored, or cached copies of data containing PII as soon as possible. We may ask you to sign a certificate of deletion and confidentiality agreement regarding the exact information you accessed. This agreement will not affect your bounty reward.

• We may ask you for the usernames and IP addresses used during your testing to assess the impact of the vulnerability

Reporting your vulnerability

• Submissions must include written instructions for reproducing the vulnerability. Submissions without clear reproduction steps or which only include reproduction steps in video form may be ineligible for a reward.

• When reporting vulnerabilities you must keep all information on HackerOne. Do not post information to video-sharing or pastebin sites. Videos and images can be uploaded directly via HackerOne.

• For vulnerabilities involving personally identifiable information, please explain the kind of PII you believe is exposed and limit the amount of PII data included in your submissions. For textual information and screenshots, please only include redacted data in your submission.

• During the course of an investigation, it may take time to resolve the issue you have reported. We ask that you refrain from publicly disclosing details regarding an issue you’ve reported until the fix has been publicly made available.

Receiving your award

• All reward amounts are determined by our severity guidelines.

• When duplicates occur, we only award the first report that was received (provided that it can be fully reproduced).

• You are free to publish write-ups about your vulnerability and GitHub will not limit what you write. We may pay out your reward before the vulnerability is patched so we may ask that you delay publishing to keep other GitHub users safe.

• Medium, high, and critical severity issues may be written up on the GitHub Bug Bounty site and included in our leaderboard. We do not currently post write-ups for low severity vulnerabilities.

• GitHub is a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) for GitHub Enterprise Server. Eligible Bug Bounty submissions that affect GitHub Enterprise Server may be assigned CVEs. These CVEs will be shared with submitters via HackerOne, included in bounty write-ups and listed in the GitHub Enterprise Server release notes.

• If you would prefer to donate your bounty reward to an established 501(c)(3) charitable organization, GitHub will match your donation. If the bounty has already been processed into your account, it can no longer be donated through HackerOne and is no longer eligible for matching donations. To reduce the likelihood of a bounty being processed before it can be donated, we recommend changing your payment preferences to monthly in your account settings. To donate your reward and have it matched, submit a support ticket to HackerOne with the following information:

• the report ID for which you want to donate the bounty;
• the name and website of the charity you want to donate to;
• that you would like the donation matched using GitHub's process; and
• whether you want to be named as the donor or would prefer to remain anonymous. Keep in mind that we can only attribute the donation to you if the charity allows us to give a name.

Scope

GitHub runs a number of services but only submissions under the following domains are eligible for rewards. Any GitHub-owned domains not listed below are not in scope, not eligible for rewards, and not covered by our legal safe harbor.

github.com

This is our main domain for hosting user-facing GitHub services.. All subdomains under github.com are in-scope except:

• blog.github.com

• community.github.com

• email.enterprise.github.com

• email.finance.github.com

• email.staging.finance.github.com

• email.support.github.com

• email.verify.github.com

• google7650dcf6146f04d8.github.com

• k1._domainkey.github.com

• k1._domainkey.mcmail.github.com

• mcmail.github.com

• resources.github.com

• *.resources.github.com

• sgmail.github.com

• *.sgmail.github.com

• shop.github.com

• smtp.github.com

• *.smtp.github.com

githubassets.com

This is our domain for hosting static assets.. All subdomains under githubassets.com are in-scope

githubusercontent.com

This is our domain for hosting and rendering users' data.. All subdomains under githubusercontent.com are in-scope

githubapp.com

This is our domain for hosting employee-facing services.. All subdomains under githubapp.com are in-scope except:

• atom-io.githubapp.com

• atom-io-staging.githubapp.com

• email.enterprise-staging.githubapp.com

• email.haystack.githubapp.com

• reply.githubapp.com

githubwebhooks.net

This is our domain for receiving webhooks for employee-facing services.. All subdomains under githubwebhooks.net are in-scope

github.net

This is our domain for hosting GitHub's internal production services. Many of these services are not accessible from outside our internal network.. All subdomains under github.net are in-scope

semmle.com

This is our main domain for Semmle and LGTM services.. All subdomains under semmle.com are in-scope except:

• dev.semmle.com

• git.semmle.com

• jira.semmle.com

• wiki.semmle.com

semmle.net

This is our domain for non-production Semmle services.. All subdomains under semmle.net are in-scope

downloads.lgtm.com

This is our domain for serving LGTM downloads.. All subdomains under downloads.lgtm.com are in-scope

lgtm-com.pentesting.semmle.net

This is an instance of LGTM especially for Bug Bounty research.. All subdomains under lgtm-com.pentesting.semmle.net are in-scope

backend-dot-lgtm-penetration-testing.appspot.com

This is an instance of LGTM's backend used for triggering automated tasks.. All subdomains under backend-dot-lgtm-penetration-testing.appspot.com are in-scope

npmjs.com

This is the domain for npm's public-facing websites.. All subdomains under npmjs.com are in-scope

npmjs.org

This is the domain for npm's registry, public-facing databases, and APIs.. All subdomains under npmjs.org are in-scope

Severity Guidelines

All bounty submissions are rated by GitHub using a purposefully simple scale. Each vulnerability is unique, but the following is a rough guideline we use internally for rating and rewarding submissions:

Critical: $20,000 - $30,000

Critical severity issues present a direct and immediate risk to a broad array of our users or to a GitHub product itself. They often affect relatively low-level/foundational components in one of our application stacks or infrastructure. For example:

• arbitrary code/command execution on a server in our production network

• arbitrary SQL queries on a production database

• bypassing the login process, either password or 2FA

• access to sensitive production user data or access to internal production systems

• accessing another user's data in the GitHub Actions service

The upper bound for critical vulnerabilities, $30,000, is only a guideline, and GitHub may reward higher amounts for exceptional reports.

High: $10,000 - $20,000

High severity issues allow an attacker to read or modify highly sensitive data that they are not authorized to access. They are generally more narrow in scope than critical issues, though they may still grant an attacker extensive access. For example:

• injecting attacker controlled content into GitHub.com (XSS) that bypasses CSP

• bypassing authorization logic to grant a repository or package collaborator more access than intended

• discovering sensitive user or GitHub data in a publicly exposed resource, such as an S3 bucket

• overwriting a customer repository or package that should be inaccessible

• gaining access to a non-critical resource that only employees should be able to reach

• using the GitHub Actions repo-scoped GitHub token to access high-risk private content outside of that repository

• sending authentication credentials from a client app to an unintended server

• code execution in a client app that requires no user interaction, such as arbitrary code execution upon repo clone, package install with the --ignore-scripts flag, or via a protocol handler

Medium: $4,000 - $10,000

Medium severity issues allow an attacker to read or modify limited amounts of data that they are not authorized to access. They generally grant access to less sensitive information than high severity issues. For example:

• disclosing the title of issues in private repositories, which should be be inaccessible

• injecting attacker controlled content into GitHub.com (XSS) but not bypassing CSP or executing sensitive actions with another user's session

• bypassing CSRF validation for low risk actions, such as starring a repository or unsubscribing from a mailing list

• escaping the LGTM worker sandbox to access other users' data or private networked resources

• code execution in a client app that requires minimal, expected user interaction, such as performing actions on a repository or with a package that a user would not expect to lead to code execution

• package integrity compromise, i.e., downloading a package that does not match the integrity as defined in package-lock.json

Low: $617 - $2,000

Low severity issues allow an attacker to access extremely limited amounts of data. They may violate an expectation for how something is intended to work but allow nearly no escalation of privilege or ability to trigger unintended behavior by an attacker. For example:

• signing up arbitrary users for access to an "early access feature" without their consent

• creating an issue comment that bypasses our image proxying filter by providing a malformed URL

• triggering verbose or debug error pages without proof of exploitability or obtaining sensitive information

• triggering application exceptions that could affect many users

• triggering XSS or CSRF vulnerabilities in LGTM

• injecting JavaScript event handlers into links, etc., that are mitigated by CSP on GitHub.com

• disclosing the existence of private packages on npm that should be inaccessible, e.g., through error messages (but not through timing attacks, which are ineligible)

• novel supply chain vulnerabilities that affect a GitHub product but are not solely limited to that product

• credentials such as those from the .npmrc file or from GitHub Enterprise Server being leaked in logs