As part of a U.S. government agency, the Railroad Retirement Board (RRB) takes seriously our responsibility to protect the railroad public's information, including financial and personal information, from unwarranted disclosure. A part of this responsibility is allowing security researchers to seek vulnerabilities in the RRB’s systems that support the mission of the agency.
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:
- 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. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to "pivot" to other systems. Once you've established that a vulnerability exists, or encountered any of the sensitive data outlined below, you must stop your test and notify us immediately.
- Keep confidential any information about discovered vulnerabilities for up to 90 calendar days after you have notified RRB.
Legal
You must comply with all applicable Federal, State, and local laws in connection with your security research activities or other participation in this vulnerability disclosure program.
RRB does not authorize, permit, or otherwise allow (expressly or impliedly) any person, including any individual, group of individuals, consortium, partnership, or any other business or legal entity to engage in any security research or vulnerability or threat disclosure activity that is inconsistent with this policy or the law. If you engage in any activities that are inconsistent with this policy or the law, you may be subject to criminal and/or civil liabilities.
To the extent that any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity involves the networks, systems, information, applications, products, or services of a non-RRB entity (e.g., other Federal departments or agencies; State, local, or tribal governments; private sector companies or persons; employees or personnel of any such entities; or any other such third party), that non-RRB third party may independently determine whether to pursue legal action or remedies related to such activities.
If you conduct your security research and vulnerability disclosure activities in accordance with the restrictions and guidelines set forth in this policy, (1) RRB will not initiate or recommend any law enforcement or civil lawsuits related to such activities, and (2) in the event of any law enforcement or civil action brought by anyone other than RRB, RRB will communicate as appropriate, in the absence of any legal restriction on RRB's ability to so communicate, that your activities were conducted pursuant to and in compliance with this policy.
Scope
Systems and/or Services that May Be Tested
This policy applies to the following systems:
Any services not expressly listed above, such as any connected services, are excluded from scope and are not authorized for testing. Additionally, vulnerabilities found in non-federal 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 security@rrb.gov before starting your research.
For any non-RRB systems, if a contact for that site can't be easily found, we encourage you to report them to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The following test types are not authorized:
- User interface bugs or typos.
- Network denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests.
- Physical testing (e.g. office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing.
- Brute Force Attacks against login interfaces
If you encounter any of the below on our systems while testing within the scope of this policy, stop your test and notify us immediately:
- Personally identifiable information
- Financial information (e.g. credit card or bank account numbers)
- Proprietary information or trade secrets of companies of any party
Authorization
If you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and RRB will not initiate or recommend legal action related to your research.
Reporting a vulnerability
The RRB accepts vulnerability reports through our bugcrowd program (https://bugcrowd.com/rrb-vdp). Reports may be submitted anonymously.
Note: We do not support PGP-encrypted emails. Do not share sensitive information through email. If you believe it is necessary to share sensitive information with us, please indicate as such on the report and RRB will reach out to establish a more secure method.
We will respond to reports within five business days of receiving the reports through any of the above channels.
Reports should include:
- Description of the location and potential impact of the vulnerability.
- A detailed description of the steps required to reproduce the vulnerability. Proof of concept (POC) scripts, screenshots, and screen captures are all helpful. Please use extreme care to properly label and protect any exploit code.
- Any technical information and related materials we would need to reproduce the issue.
Please keep your vulnerability reports current by sending us any new information as it becomes available.
We may share your vulnerability reports with US-CERT, as well as any affected vendors or open source projects.
Coordinated Disclosure
RRB 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 request 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 are also welcome to self-disclose if you prefer. By default, we prefer to disclose everything, but we will 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.
Questions
Questions regarding this policy can be sent to security@rrb.gov.