United States International Trade Commission - Vulnerability Disclosure Program

Introduction

The U.S International Trade Commission (USITC) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences for how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.

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.

We encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems.

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, we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and the USITC will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should a third party initiate legal action against you for activities that you conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known.

Guidelines

Under this policy, "research" means activities in which you:

• Test only the systems identified as “in scope” in the “Scope” section below.
• Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.
• Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.
• Use exploits only to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish command line access or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.
• Provide us with a reasonable amount of time to resolve the issue before you disclose it publicly. The USITC requests that you wait 90 days after we acknowledge receipt of your report before you disclose it publicly. We will attempt to notify submitters in a timely manner if vulnerabilities are addressed before the expiration of the 90-day waiting period.
• Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports (e.g., user-interface bugs or typos).

Once you have established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including personally identifiable information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately at VDP@usitc.gov, and not disclose this data to anyone else.