| ▲ | Dove 4 hours ago | |
Let us imagine a Bug Bounty Bouncer Service. The project does not accept bug bounty submissions without BBBS attestation. To get it, you must first submit your report to the BBBS for review. Now, if this is your first submission (you are unknown to the BBBS), you must submit $50 to the BBBS along with the bug report, to pay a human to spend an hour looking at your work to verify it is written in good faith. This is not a review of whether the bug is real or valuable, just a readover to verify the report is coherent and plausible. If you have done this before, you can get a free attestation based on being a member in good standing, but submitting slop (per the judgement of the BBBS reviewer or the project receiving the report) is an account ban. The BBBS couldn't steal your work and submit it themselves if they gave you some sort of signed hash as a receipt, which as a side effect would also be a deterrant against bounty programs stealing your work. Submissions would only be expensive per submission for an anonymous user, enabling the low friction high trust communication under which collaboration works best when reputation has been established. The BBBS itself won't be overrun by slop since the price of establishing an account far exceeds what a bot might expect to make with a single malicious submission. Nor can legitimate established accounts be sold since the cost of creating them exceeds the value to be expected from abusing them. Moreover, the cost to establish a reputation as a bug bounty hunter is small in dollars compared to the cost in time and expertise that a legitimate hunter would be expected to expend in the course of their work. The vast majority of slop would go away as the cost of a first submission is much too high. The cost to the project is close to nothing - integrating with the BBBS attestation API. The cost to a legitimate bug bounty hunter is low - some human review while establishing a reputation, which could even be made useful if it came in the form of feedback. All review is paid for by the submitter, so no one is trying to counter infinite slop with volunteer hours. Moreover, the BBBS can serve as a mediator of trust, not only against AI, but as a place to receive reputational merit for high value work and trustworthy bug bounty programs. I realize I am describing a lightweight guild, which is subject to well known political failure modes (the most significant of which is exploiting newcomers), but the concept has the advantage that guilds have functioned as successful slop gatekeepers in society for a very long time and a lot is known about how to make them work. | ||