> because there aren't existing business processes those vulnerabilities drop seamlessly into; they're all situational and time-sensitive.

what's an example of an existing business process that would make them valuable, just in theory? why do they not exist for xss vulns? why, and in what sense, are they only situational and time-sensitive?

i know you're an expert in this field. i'm not doubting the assertions just trying to understand them better. if i understand you're argument correctly, you're not doubting that the vuln found here could be damaging, only doubting that it could make money for an adversary willing to exploit it?

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tptacek 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I can't think of a business process that accepts and monetizes pin-compatible XSS vulnerabilities.

But for RCE, there's lots of them! RCE vulnerabilities slot into CNE implants, botnets, ransomware rigs, and organized identity theft.

The key thing here is that these businesses already exist. There are already people in the market for the vulnerabilities. If you just imagine a new business driven by XSS vulnerabilities, that doesn't create customers, any more than imagining a new kind of cloud service instantly gets you funded for one.

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jonahx 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Thank you, makes a lot of sense.

I wonder what you think of this, re: the disparity between the economics you just laid out and the "companies are such fkn misers!" comments that always arise in these threads on bounty payouts...

I've seen first hand how companies devalue investment in security -- after all, it's an insurance policy whose main beneficiaries are their customers. Sure it's also reputational insurance in theory, but what is that compared with showing more profit this quarter, or using the money for growth if you're a startup, etc. Basically, the economic incentives are to foist the risks onto your customers and gamble that a huge incident won't sink you.

I wonder if that background calculus -- which is broadly accurate, imo -- is what rankles people about the low bounty rewards, especially from companies that could afford more?

	▲	tptacek 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The premise that "fucking companies are misers" operate on that I don't share is that vulnerabilities are finite and that, in the general case, there's an existential cost to not identifying and fixing them. From decades of vulnerability research work, including (over the past 5 years) as a buyer rather than a seller of that work: put 2 different teams on a project, get 2 different sets of vulnerabilities, with maybe 30-50% overlap. Keep doing that; you'll keep finding stuff. Seen through that light, bug bounty programs are engineering services, not a security control. A thing generalist developers definitely don't get about high-end bug bounty programs is that they are more about focusing internal resources than they are about generating any particular set of bugs. They're a way of prioritizing triage and hardening work, driven by external incentives. The idea that Discord is, like, eliminating their XSS risk by bidding for XSS vulnerabilities from bounty hunters; I mean, just, obviously no, right?

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jgeralnik 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A remote code execution bug in ios is valuable - it may take a long time to detect exploitation (potentially years if used carefully), and even after being discovered there is a long tail of devices that take time to update (although less so than on android, or linux run on embedded devices that can’t be updated) That’s why it’s worth millions on the black market and apple will pay you $2 million dollars for it

An XSS is much harder to exploit quietly (the server can log everything), and can be closed immediately 100% with no long tail. At the push of an update the vulnerability is now worth zero. Someone paying to purchase an XSS is probably intending to use it once (with a large blast radius) and get as much as they can from it in the time until it is closed (hours? maybe days?)