Republik AG

Hacking Methods

In participating in the program, ethical hackers agree not to use methods that would adversely affect the tested applications or their users. These include:

• Social engineering
• Spamming
• Phishing
• Denial-of-service attacks or other brute force attacks
• Physical attacks

In addition to the prohibited hacking methods listed above, Friendly Hackers are required to immediately discontinue vulnerability scanning if they determine that their conduct will result in a significant degradation (negative impact on regular users or on the operations team) of the Platform's or Service's operations.

Criticality Classification

The classification is verified using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS, see first.org).

• Low: 0.1 – 3.9
• Medium: 4.0 – 6.9
• High: 7.0 – 8.9
• Critical: 9.0 - 10

Qualified vulnerabilities

Any design or implementation problem can be reported that is reproducible and affects security.

Typical examples:

• Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
• Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
• Insecure Direct Object Reference
• Remote Code Execution (RCE) - Injection Flaws
• Information Leakage an Improper Error Handling
• Unauthorized access to properties or accounts

Other examples:

• Data/information leaks
• Possibility of data/information exfiltration
• Backdoors that can be actively exploited
• Potential for unauthorized system use
• Misconfigurations

Non-qualified vulnerabilities

The following vulnerabilities and forms of documentation are generally not wanted and will be rejected:

• Attacks that require physical access to a user's device or network
• Forms with missing CSRF tokens (unless the criticality exceeds CVSS level 5)
• Self-XSS
• The use of a library known to be vulnerable or publicly known to be broken (unless there is active evidence of exploitability)
• Reports from automated tools or scans without explanatory documentation
• Social engineering targeting individuals or entities of the organisation
• Denial-of-service (DoS) or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks
• Bots, spam, bulk registration
• Submission of best practices that do not directly result in an exploitable vulnerability  (e.g., certificate pinning, missing security headers)
• Use of vulnerable and "weak" cipher suites/ciphers
• Missing Rate limiting without further security impact

Cost control

The program is suspended when the set cost limit is reached.