Skip to main content

Vulnerability Disclosure Policy

At Skylight, we take seriously our responsibility to protect people’s information from unwarranted disclosure.

We want security researchers to feel comfortable reporting vulnerabilities they’ve discovered, as set out in this policy, so that we can fix them and keep our information safe.

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.

Guidelines

We require that you:

Scope

This policy applies to the following systems: skylight.digital.

Any services not expressly listed above, such as any connected services, are excluded from scope and aren’t authorized for testing. Additionally, vulnerabilities found in non-Skylight 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 or endpoint is in scope or not, contact us at [email protected] before starting your research.

The following test types aren’t authorized:

If you encounter any of the below on our systems while testing within the scope of this policy, stop your test and notify us at [email protected] immediately:

Authorization

If you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we’ll consider your research to be authorized, will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and Skylight won’t initiate or recommend legal action related to your research.

Reporting a vulnerability

We accept and discuss vulnerability reports via email at [email protected]. Reports may be submitted anonymously. Note: we don’t support PGP-encrypted emails. For particularly sensitive information, please don’t submit via email. Contact us to arrange an alternative mechanism.

Reports should include:

We may share your vulnerability reports with US-CERT, as well as any affected vendors or open source projects.

Coordinated Disclosure

Skylight is committed to patching vulnerabilities within 90 days or less, and disclosing the details of those vulnerabilities when patches are published. We believe that public disclosure of vulnerabilities is an essential part of the vulnerability disclosure process, and that one of the best ways to make software better is to enable everyone to learn from each other’s mistakes.

At the same time, we believe that disclosure in absence of a readily available patch tends to increase risk rather than reduce it, and so we ask that you refrain from sharing your report with others while we work on our patch. If you believe there are others that should be informed of your report before the patch is available, please let us know so we can make arrangements.

We may want to coordinate an advisory with you to be published simultaneously with the patch, but you’re also welcome to self-disclose if you prefer. By default, we prefer to disclose everything, but we’ll never publish information about you or our communications with you without your permission. In some cases, we may also have some sensitive information that should be redacted, and so please check with us before self-disclosing.

Future changes

If we decide to change this policy, we’ll update the modification date below.

Updated: February 24, 2018

Change lives every day.

We need great technologists, designers, and more to work on changing
how the government serves the public.