The U. S. Commission on Civil Rights (“USCCR’) is committed to maintaining the security of our systems and protecting sensitive information from unauthorized disclosure.
This policy describes what systems and types of security 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 encourage security researchers to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities identified in USCCR systems. For reports submitted in compliance with this policy, USCCR will acknowledge receipt within three business days, endeavor to timely validate submissions, implement corrective actions if appropriate, and inform researchers of the disposition of reported vulnerabilities.
If you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and we will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research.
Test Methods
Security researchers must not:
- Test any system other than the systems set forth in the ‘Scope’ section below,
- disclose vulnerability information except as set forth in the ‘Reporting a Vulnerability’ and ‘Disclosure’ sections below,
- engage in physical testing of facilities or resources,
- engage in social engineering,
- send unsolicited electronic mail to USCCR 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 USCCR systems; or intentionally impair, disrupt, or disable USCCR systems,
- test third-party applications, websites, or services that integrate with or link to or from USCCR systems,
- delete, alter, share, retain, or destroy USCCR data, or render USCCR data inaccessible, or,
- use an exploit to exfiltrate data, establish command line access, establish a persistent presence on USCCR systems, or “pivot” to other USCCR systems.
Security researchers may:
- View or store USCCR 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, and,
- purge any stored USCCR nonpublic data upon reporting a vulnerability.
Scope
This policy applies to any internet-accessible information system or service managed by USCCR.
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 its disclosure policy (if any).
Reporting a Vulnerability
Reports are accepted via electronic mail at ccrsoc@usccr.gov. Acceptable message formats are plain text, rich text, and HTML.
Reports should provide a detailed technical description of the steps required to reproduce the vulnerability, including a description of any tools needed to identify or exploit the vulnerability. Images, e.g., screen captures, and other documents may be attached to reports. It is helpful to give attachments illustrative names. Reports may include proof-of-concept code that demonstrates exploitation of the vulnerability. We request that any scripts or exploit code be embedded into non-executable file types. We can process all common file types, and also file archives including Winzip.
We may contact researchers to clarify reported vulnerability information or other technical interchange.
USCCR prefers that vulnerability report messages be encrypted. We utilize opportunistic Transport Layer Security (TLS) for both incoming and outgoing electronic mail.
By submitting a report to the USCCR, researchers warrant that the report and any attachments do not violate the intellectual property rights of any third party and the submitter grants USCCR a non-exclusive, royalty-free, world-wide, perpetual license to use, reproduce, create derivative works, and publish the report and any attachments.
By submitting a vulnerability, you acknowledge that you have no expectation of payment and that you expressly waive any future pay claims against the U.S Commission on Civil Rights and U.S. Government related to your submission.
Disclosure
The USCCR is committed to timely correction of vulnerabilities. However, we recognize that public disclosure of a vulnerability in absence of a readily-available corrective action likely increases versus decreases risk. Accordingly, we require that you refrain from sharing information about discovered vulnerabilities for 90 calendar days after you have received our acknowledgement of receipt of your report. If you believe others should be informed of the vulnerability prior to our implementation of corrective actions, we require that you coordinate in advance with us.
We may share vulnerability reports with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), as well as any affected vendors. We will not share names or contact data of security researchers unless given explicit permission.