Intel Launches Bug Bounty Program

Intel's first bug bounty program is live. Targeted at Intel products, the program encourages researchers to identify issues and bring them to Intel directly.

Intel revealed the new bug bounty program will be hosted on HackerOne at the CanSecWest security conference on Wednesday.

Intel Software, Firmware, and Hardware are in-scope. The harder a vulnerability is to mitigate, the more Intel pays. As a consequence, critical bugs are the most lucrative, with $7,500 on offer for critical Intel software bugs, up to $10,000 for critical Intel firmware security flaws, and up to $30,000 for each critical Intel hardware bug disclosed to the company.

If a bug is deemed of "high" importance, up to $10,000 is up for grabs, while a "medium" severity bug can earn researchers up to $2,000. In addition, "low" risk security flaws are worth up to $1,000.

Intel considers several factors when determining the severity of a vulnerability. The first step is to use the CVSS 3.0 calculator to compute a base score. The base score is then adjusted up or down based on the security objectives and threat model for the given product.

A few details on items that are not in the program scope:

Intel Security (McAfee) products are not in-scope for the bug bounty program.
Third-party products and open source are not in-scope for the bug bounty program.
Intel's Web Infrastructure is not in-scope for the bug bounty program.
Recent acquisitions are not in-scope for the bug bounty program for a minimum period of 6 months after the acquisition is complete.

In related news, Microsoft also announced a new bug bounty program on Wednesday for the Microsoft Office Insider on Windows. The companys it will offer researchers a minimum of $500 and maximum of $15,000 for vulnerability submissions which are discovered in the Microsoft Office Insider slow build shipping on the latest, fully patched version of the Windows 10 Desktop operating system.

The flaws must be zero-day vulnerabilities and the Microsoft team must be able to replicate the problem for a bug to qualify for a reward. The company will also consider rewarding researchers with more than $15,000 if the security flaw is something special.

Vulnerability Impact	Functioning Exploit	Proof of concept	Report Quality	Potential Payout range (USD)
Elevation of privilege via Office Protected View sandbox escape (excludes vulnerabilities in components and libraries not installed by Office or AppContainer sandbox, that are applicable to any application using them)	No	Required	High	Up to $15,000
	No	Required	Low	Up to $9,000
Macro execution by bypassing security policies to block Office macros in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.	No	Required	High	Up to $15,000
	No	Required	Low	Up to $9,000
Code execution by bypassing Outlook’s automatic attachment block policies for a predefined set of extensions, listed below, that are by default blocked by Outlook.	No	Required	High	Up to $9,000
	No	Required	Low	Up to $6,000