Awarding Google Cloud Vulnerability Research

Posted by Felix Groebert, Information Security Engineering

Today, we’re excited to announce a yearly Google Cloud Platform (GCP) VRP Prize to promote security research of GCP. A prize of $100,000.00 will be paid to the reporter of the best vulnerability affecting GCP reported through our Vulnerability Reward Program (g.co/vulnz) and having a public write-up (nominations will be received here).

We’ve received vulnerability reports for various application security flaws in GCP over the years, but we felt research of our Cloud platform has been under-represented in our Vulnerability Reward Program. So, with the GCP VRP Prize, we hope to encourage even more researchers to focus on GCP products and help us identify even more security vulnerabilities.

Note that we will continue to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to our top bug hunters through our Vulnerability Research Grants Program even when no bugs are found, and to reward up to tens of thousands of dollars per bug to the most impactful findings. This prize is meant to create an additional incentive for more people to focus on public, open security research on GCP who would otherwise not participate in the reward program.

This competition draws on our previous contests, such as Pwnium and the Project Zero Prize, and rather than focusing bug hunters on collecting vulnerabilities for complex bug chains, we are attempting a slightly different twist and selecting a single winner out of all vulnerabilities we receive. That said, this approach comes with its own challenges, such as: defining the right incentives for bug hunters (both in terms of research as well as their communications with our team when reporting vulnerabilities); or ensuring there are no conflicting incentives, either when our own team is looking for similar vulnerabilities (since we aren't eligible for collecting the prize).

For the rest of the year, we will be seeking feedback from our top bug hunters and the security community to help define what vulnerabilities are the most significant, and we hope we can work together to find the best way to incentivize, recognize, and reward open security research. To further incentivize research in 2019, we will be issuing GCP VRP grants summing up to $100,000 to our top 2018 researchers.

Head over here for the full details on the contest. Note that if you have budget constraints for access to testing environments, you can use the free tier of GCP.

We look forward to our Vulnerability Rewards Programs resulting in even more GCP customer protection in the following years thanks to the hard work of the security research community. Follow us on @GoogleVRP.