Purpose
The Federal Housing Finance Agency (“FHFA") is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.
This policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.
We encourages you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems.
Scope
All fhfa.gov and mortgagetranslations.gov domains are within scope of the FHFA’s vulnerability disclosure program and are authorized for testing, with the exception of the following vendor owned systems:
- foiapal.fhfa.gov
- foiapal-test.fhfa.gov
Vulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at domainsecurity@fhfa.gov before starting your research.
Authorization for Researchers
If you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research we will consider your research to be authorized, and we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly. FHFA will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known.
Guidelines
Under this policy, “research" means activities in which you:
- Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.
- Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.
- Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability's presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish persistent command line access, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.
- Provide us a minimum of 90 days to resolve the issue before requesting to publicly disclose the report.
- Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.
- Conduct research with no expectation of recognition or compensation from FHFA. FHFA does not offer a bug bounty reward program.
Once you have established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including personally identifiable information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.
Test Methods
Security researchers must not:
- Test any system other than the systems set forth in the 'Scope' section below.
- Engage in physical testing of facilities or resources.
- Engage in social engineering.
- Send unsolicited electronic mail to FHFA users, including “phishing" messages.
- Execute or attempt to execute “Denial of Service" or “Resource Exhaustion" attacks.
- Introduce malicious software.
- Test in a manner which could degrade the operation of FHFA systems; or intentionally impair, disrupt, or disable FHFA systems.
- Test third-party applications, websites, or services that integrate with or link to or from FHFA systems.
- Delete, alter, share, retain, or destroy FHFA data, or render FHFA data inaccessible.
- Use an exploit to exfiltrate data, establish command line access, establish a persistent presence on FHFA systems, or “pivot" to other FHFA systems.
Security researchers may:
- View or store FHFA nonpublic data only to the extent necessary to document the presence of a potential vulnerability.
Security researchers must:
- Cease testing and notify us immediately upon discovery of a vulnerability.
- Cease testing and notify us immediately upon discovery of an exposure of nonpublic data.
- Purge any stored FHFA nonpublic data upon reporting a vulnerability.
Reporting a Vulnerability
Information submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the FHFA, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process.
We accept vulnerability reports through our bugcrowd program (https://bugcrowd.com/fhfa-vdp) and questions can be directed to domainsecurity@fhfa.gov. Reports may be submitted anonymously. If you share contact information, we will acknowledge receipt of your report within 5 business days.
What we would like to see from you
In order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:
- Describe the location the vulnerability was discovered and the potential impact of exploitation.
- Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots are helpful).
- Be in English, if possible.
What you can expect from us
When you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.
- Within five business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.
- To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including any issues or challenges that may delay resolution.
- We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.
Questions
Questions regarding this policy may be sent to domainsecurity@fhfa.gov. The FHFA encourages security researchers to contact us for clarification on any element of this policy. Please contact FHFA prior to conducting research if you are unsure if a specific test method is inconsistent with or unaddressed by this policy. We also invite security researchers to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.
Document change history
| Version | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0 | February 2021 | First issuance |
| 2.0 | May 2024 | Updated to use Bugcrowd submission platform |
| 3.0 | July 2024 | Updated to exclude vendor owned systems |