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Whoa, this kind of impressed me (linked from the blog post) https://bughunters.google.com/about/patch-rewards

Payouts for security-positive improvements to security-critical OSS projects:

* $20,000 for setting up continuous fuzzing with OSS-Fuzz

* $10,000 for high-impact improvements that prevent major classes of vulnerabilities

but the low end of the scale is kind of neat too:

* "$1,337 for submissions of modest complexity, or for ones that offer fairly speculative gains."

* "$500 our "one-liner special" for smaller improvements that still have a merit from the security standpoint."

... and you can qualify for these even if your day job is working on one of these OSS projects!

> Q: I'm a core developer working on one of the in-scope projects. Do my own patches qualify?

> A: They most certainly do.

Neat stuff.

(Googler here, but I don't work on the VRP.)




1. Press [Submit]

2. Thank you for your submission, that was already known issue.


Will project maintainers avoid writing issue tickets before sending the patch to this platform?


> https://bughunters.google.com/about/patch-rewards

> (Googler here, but I don't work on the VRP.)

The URL that you posted doesn't render correctly on Firefox 90 for Linux.


They need to mltiply these amounts by 50x. Cybersec researchers make 6-7 figures. 20k is almost nothing.


Not sure why you're downvoted, but the $3M/year total rewards payoff is likely smaller than the corporate administrative and developer time (for review) costs. I.e. if this was a charity it would pay out less than 50 cents on the dollar.


I downvoted because "cybersec researchers" do not in fact routinely make 7 figures. For strong pentester types reporting the typical (real) vulnerability the VRP handles, the median is probably in the low 6's.


6 figures from breaking systems and reporting them responsibly?

Sounds amazing, what's the catch?


There's no catch. You want a job as a pentester. That job is in high demand.


Frankly low 6 figures sounds low for a software job. How do you attract talent at that level?


The median bounty hunter isn't an SFBA software developer.


Is it international arbitrage? Or something else cause low 6 figures is now the going rate all over the states.

*not trying to be argumentative just trying to price the market.


It's a combination of the lower value of the median bug bounty submission (we hear about the high-ticket vulnerabilities, but most of them are pretty low-test) and the fact that huge numbers of bounty participants are abroad. I know there are people who claim to make high-6's and even low-7's from bounties, but they're very rare. I think most people who participate in bounties would be best off financially by using them to build a portfolio they can exploit to pivot into consulting or full-time work of some other sort.


Not everyone can move from wherever they are to the Bay area though.




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