Last week, we wrote about the shared responsibility of protecting Internet security. Today, we want to dive deeper into this issue and focus on one very important obligation governments have: proper disclosure of security vulnerabilities.

Software vulnerabilities are at the root of so much of today’s cyber insecurity. The revelations of recent attacks on the DNC, the state electoral systems, the iPhone, and more, have all stemmed from software vulnerabilities. Security vulnerabilities can be created inadvertently by the original developers, or they can be developed or discovered by third parties. Sometimes governments acquire, develop, or discover vulnerabilities and use them in hacking operations (“lawful hacking”). Either way, once governments become aware of a security vulnerability, they have a responsibility to consider how and when (not whether) to disclose the vulnerability to the affected company so that developer can fix the problem and protect their users. We need to work with governments on how they handle vulnerabilities to ensure they are responsible partners in making this a reality today.

In the U.S., the government’s process for reviewing and coordinating the disclosure of vulnerabilities that it learns about or creates is called the Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP). The VEP was established in 2010, but not operationalized until the Heartbleed vulnerability in 2014 that reportedly affected two thirds of the Internet. At that time, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel wrote in a blog post that the Obama Administration has a presumption in favor of disclosing vulnerabilities. But, policy by blog post is not particularly binding on the government, and as Daniel even admits, “there are no hard and fast rules” to govern the VEP.

It has now been two years since Heartbleed and the U.S. government’s blog post, but we haven’t seen improvement in the way that vulnerabilities disclosure is being handled. Just one example is the alleged hack of the NSA by the Shadow Brokers, which resulted in the public release of NSA “cyberweapons”, including “zero day” vulnerabilities that the government knew about and apparently had been exploiting for years. Companies like Cisco and Fortinet whose products were affected by these zero day vulnerabilities had just that, zero days to develop fixes to protect users before the vulnerabilities were possibly exploited by hackers.

The government may have legitimate intelligence or law enforcement reasons for delaying disclosure of vulnerabilities (for example, to enable lawful hacking), but these same vulnerabilities can endanger the security of billions of people. These two interests must be balanced, and recent incidents demonstrate just how easily stockpiling vulnerabilities can go awry without proper policies and procedures in place.

Cybersecurity is a shared responsibility, and that means we all must do our part – technology companies, users, and governments. The U.S. government could go a long way in doing its part by putting transparent and accountable policies in place to ensure it is handling vulnerabilities appropriately and disclosing them to affected companies. We aren’t seeing this happen today. Still, with some reforms, the VEP can be a strong mechanism for ensuring the government is striking the right balance.

More specifically, we recommend five important reforms to the VEP:

All security vulnerabilities should go through the VEP and there should be public timelines for reviewing decisions to delay disclosure.

All relevant federal agencies involved in the VEP must work together to evaluate a standard set of criteria to ensure all relevant risks and interests are considered.

Independent oversight and transparency into the processes and procedures of the VEP must be created.

The VEP Executive Secretariat should live within the Department of Homeland Security because they have built up significant expertise, infrastructure, and trust through existing coordinated vulnerability disclosure programs (for example, US CERT).

The VEP should be codified in law to ensure compliance and permanence.

These changes would improve the state of cybersecurity today.

We’ll dig into the details of each of these recommendations in a blog post series from the Mozilla Policy team over the coming weeks – stay tuned for that.

Today, you can watch Heather West, Mozilla Senior Policy Manager, discuss this issue at the New America Open Technology Institute event on the topic of “How Should We Govern Government Hacking?” The event can be viewed here.