RII Vulnerability Disclosure Policy

Introduction​

Research Innovations Inc. (RII) is committed to ensuring the security of its assets to protect not only corporate information, but also protect customers who use RII products and services.  This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities for our analysis and reporting. 

This policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to submit vulnerability reports, and to communicate a reasonable amount of time for RII to resolve the issue before researchers can publicly disclose. 

We encourage Researchers to contact RII to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems.

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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 Research Innovations Inc will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known.

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Guidelines​

Under this policy, “research” is defined as activities in which you:

• 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.

• Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish persistent command line access, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.

• Provide us a reasonable amount of time to resolve the issue before you disclose it publicly.

• Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.

We require that all researchers and reporters:

• Use the communication channels identified here to report vulnerability information.

• Comply with all applicable U.S. and Non-U.S. federal, state, and local laws and regulations, when conducting research activities.

• Halt all activity, and notify Research Innovations Inc immediately, if they encounter personal information/personal data.

• Do not exfiltrate, store, share, destroy, or otherwise compromise any Research Innovations Inc, customer, or any third-party data under any circumstances.

• Do not perform any action that can potentially degrade or stop our systems, assets, products, and platforms, e.g. denial of service (DoS/DDoS) testing.

• Not to exploit any potential vulnerability beyond the minimal amount of testing required to determine that a vulnerability or issue exists.

• Not utilize the findings, if reported or validated here, to enumerate or exploit Research Innovations Inc, customers of Research Innovations Inc, other companies, or individuals.

• Disengage and avoid activity that could potentially harm Research Innovations Inc employees, our customers, Research Innovations Inc, or any third parties.

• Keep information about any vulnerabilities you have discovered confidential between yourself and Research Innovations Inc until we have had a minimum 120 days to verify and resolve the issue. Research Innovations Inc may extend this period, at its sole discretion, based on the complexity and or scope of the issue.

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If you follow the guidelines listed above, Research Innovations Inc will not pursue any legal action against you related to your research.

If at any time you have concerns or are uncertain whether your security research is consistent with this policy, please submit a report through our official channels.

Once you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or have encountered 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, and not disclose this data to anyone else.

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Test Methods​

The following test methods are not authorized:

• Network denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data

• Physical testing (e.g. office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing

• Extortion, ransomware, clickjacking, or similar

• Phishing, spamming users, or other social engineering

• Self-XSS

• Spoofing

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Scope​

This policy applies to the following systems and services:

• https://www.researchinnovations.com and including all sub-domains

• All RII-developed software products and/or source code delivered as part of a contract

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Any service not expressly listed above, such as any connected services, are excluded from scope and are not authorized for testing. Additionally, vulnerabilities found in 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 is in scope or not, contact us at

cyber-security@researchinnovations.com before starting your research.

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Though we develop and maintain other internet-accessible systems or services, we ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.​

Reporting A Vulnerability

Information submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities.

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We accept vulnerability reports using the form below or via cyber–security@researchinnovations.com. Reports may be submitted anonymously. If you share contact information, we will acknowledge receipt of your report within 3 business days.

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We do not support PGP-encrypted emails. For particularly sensitive information, submit through our HTTPS web form.

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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. Government related to your submission. 

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What we would like to see from you:

In order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:

• Describe the location the vulnerability was discovered and the potential impact of exploitation.

• Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots are helpful).

• Be in English, if possible.

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What you can expect from us:

When you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.

• Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.

• To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.

• We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.

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Questions

Questions regarding this policy may be sent to cyber-security@researchinnovations.com. We also invite researchers to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.

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