We all benefit from the amazing volunteer work done by the open source community. That’s why we keep asking ourselves how to take the model pioneered with our Vulnerability Reward Program - and employ it to improve the security of key third-party software critical to the health of the entire Internet.

We thought about simply kicking off an OSS bug-hunting program, but this approach can easily backfire. In addition to valid reports, bug bounties invite a significant volume of spurious traffic - enough to completely overwhelm a small community of volunteers. On top of this, fixing a problem often requires more effort than finding it.

So we decided to try something new: provide financial incentives for down-to-earth, proactive improvements that go beyond merely fixing a known security bug. Whether you want to switch to a more secure allocator, to add privilege separation, to clean up a bunch of sketchy calls to strcat(), or even just to enable ASLR - we want to help!

We intend to roll out the program gradually, based on the quality of the received submissions and the feedback from the developer community. For the initial run, we decided to limit the scope to the following projects:

Core infrastructure network services: OpenSSH, BIND, ISC DHCP

Core infrastructure image parsers: libjpeg, libjpeg-turbo, libpng, giflib

Open-source foundations of Google Chrome: Chromium, Blink

Other high-impact libraries: OpenSSL, zlib

Security-critical, commonly used components of the Linux kernel (including KVM)

Widely used web servers: Apache httpd, lighttpd, nginx

Popular SMTP services: Sendmail, Postfix, Exim

Toolchain security improvements for GCC, binutils, and llvm

Virtual private networking: OpenVPN

Before participating, please read the official rules posted on this page; the document provides additional information about eligibility, rewards, and other important stuff.

Please submit your patches directly to the maintainers of the individual projects. Once your patch is accepted and merged into the repository, please follow the submission process outlined here. If we think that the submission has a demonstrable, positive impact on the security of the project, you will qualify for a reward ranging from $500 to $3,133.7.

Happy patching!