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Responsible Disclosure

At Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences (RUAS), we consider the security of our systems a top priority. But no matter how much effort we put into system security, there can still be vulnerabilities present. If you discover a vulnerability, we would like to know about it so we can take steps to address it as quickly as possible. We would like to ask you to help us better protect our clients and our systems.

Not an open invitation to scan us

Our resposible disclosure statement is not an open invitation to scan our network and systems for weaknesses. We monitor our network extensively. There is a big chance that we would detect your scan and our Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) will start investigating. Which would lead to unnecessary costs.

Prosecution

It is possible that you perform actions during your research that are punishable under criminal law. If you adhere to the conditions below, we, RUAS, will not take any legal action against you. The Public Prosecution Service (OM) has the right to decide whether it will take action on it's own behalf.

Please do the following:

  • E-mail your findings to cert@hr.nl. Encrypt your findings using our S/MIME public key or PGP key (fingerprint 79B2 945F 2155 45A8 8C73 EA46 B0E8 BEF2 1C5A C4B6) to prevent this critical information from falling into the wrong hands.
  • Do not take advantage of the vulnerability or problem you have discovered, for example by downloading more data than necessary to demonstrate the vulnerability or deleting or modifying other people's data.
  • Be extra careful with personal data.
  • Do not reveal the problem to others until it has been resolved.
  • Do not use attacks on physical security, social engineering, distributed denial of service, spam or applications of third parties.
  • Do provide sufficient information to reproduce the problem, so we will be able to resolve it as quickly as possible. Usually, the IP address or the URL of the affected system and a description of the vulnerability will be sufficient, but complex vulnerabilities may require further explanation. 

What we promise:

  • We will respond to your report within 5 business days with our evaluation of the report and an expected resolution date.
  • We will handle your report with strict confidentiality, and not pass on your personal details to third parties without your permission.
  • We will keep you informed of the progress towards resolving the problem.
  • You are allowed to submit the report anonymously or using an alias. In this case however we will not be able to contact you regarding things like subsequent actions, progress towards resolving the problem, publication and a possible reward.
  • In the public information concerning the problem reported, we will give your name as the discoverer of the problem (unless you desire otherwise).
  • As a token of our gratitude for your assistance, we may offer a reward for every report of a security problem that was not yet known to us. Whether we offer a reward and the type and amount of the reward will be determined per case and based on the quality of the report and the severity of the leak. 
  • We strive to resolve all problems as quickly as possible, and we would like to play an active role in the ultimate publication on the problem after it is resolved.

Out of scope

RUAS does not reward trivial vulnerabilities or bugs that cannot be abused. There is a network and a webserver that is used for experiments of students and researchers, those websites and server are also out of scope. The following are examples of known and accepted vulnerabilities and risks that are outside the scope of the responsible disclosure policy:

  • Everything in the 145.24.222.0/24 network
  • All websites hosted on 145.24.129.62 (octagon.hro.nl)
  • HTTP 404 codes/pages or other HTTP non-200 codes/pages and Content Spoofing/Text Injection on these pages.
  • fingerprint version banner disclosure on common/public services.
  • disclosure of known public files or directories or non-sensitive information, (e.g. robots.txt).
  • clickjacking and issues only exploitable through clickjacking.
  • lack of Secure/HTTPOnly flags on non-sensitive Cookies.
  • OPTIONS HTTP method enabled.
  • anything related to HTTP security headers, e.g.:
    • Strict-Transport-Security.
    • X-Frame-Options.
    • X-XSS-Protection.
    • X-Content-Type-Options.
    • Content-Security-Policy.
  • SSL Configuration Issues:
    • SSL forward secrecy not enabled.
    • weak / insecure cipher suites.
  • SPF, DKIM, DMARC issues.
  • host header injection.
  • reporting older versions of any software without proof of concept or working exploit.
  • information leakage in metadata.

Our policy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. The policy is based on the responsible disclosure policy used by SURF and the example policy made by Floor Terra.

Service Description (RFC 2350)

RFC 2350 is an international standard for Computer Security Incident Response Teams. This standard describes how CERT-RUAS can be contacted in case of an incident.