Pay your membership fee Change Practice Details

Vulnerability Disclosure Policy

The Vulnerability Disclosure Policy is intended for publication on MIPS website. The purpose of a Vulnerability Disclosure Policy is to establish a structured and secure framework that encourages individuals to responsibly report security flaws, enabling proactive identification and remediation of potential threats before they can be exploited maliciously.

This Vulnerability Disclosure Policy was developed with expert advice from Status Security.

Introduction

MIPS is committed to ensuring the security of its members and people by protecting their information from unwarranted disclosure. 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 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 want security researchers to feel comfortable reporting vulnerabilities they’ve discovered – as set out in this policy – so we can fix them and keep our members and people safe. We have developed this policy to reflect our values and uphold our sense of responsibility to security researchers who share their expertise with us in good faith.

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 MIPS will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research.

Policy

Under this policy, “research” means 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 command line access and/or persistence, 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, as set forth in the ‘Disclosure’ section below.
  • You do not intentionally compromise the privacy or safety of MIPS members, personnel or any third parties.
  • You do not intentionally compromise the intellectual property or other commercial or financial interests of any MIPS members, personnel or entities, or any third parties.

Once you’ve 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, and not disclose this data to anyone else.

Scope

All systems and services associated with domains listed below are in scope, including subdomains:

  • https://www.mips.com.au

If you aren’t sure whether a system or endpoint is in scope or not, contact security@mips.com.au before starting your research or for any other questions.

Though MIPS may 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 system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first.

Rules of Engagement

Security researchers must not:

  • Test any system other than the systems set forth in the ‘Scope’ section above.
  • 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 MIPS 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 MIPS systems; or intentionally impair, disrupt, or disable MIPS systems.
  • Test third-party applications, websites, or services that integrate with or link to or from MIPS systems.
  • Delete, alter, share, retain, or destroy MIPS data, or render MIPS data inaccessible.
  • Use an exploit to exfiltrate data, establish command line access, establish a persistent presence on MIPS systems, or “pivot” to other MIPS systems.

Security researchers may:

  • View or store MIPS non-public 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 non-public data.
  • Purge any stored MIPS non-public data upon reporting a vulnerability.

Reporting a Vulnerability

MIPS accepts vulnerability reports at security@mips.com.au. Reports may be submitted anonymously.

Information submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. We may share the information with other organisations such as MIPS’s technology partners or the Australian Cyber Security Centre to coordinate the vulnerability remediation. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.

By submitting a report, you are indicating that you have read, understand, and agree to the guidelines described in this policy for the conduct of security research and disclosure of vulnerabilities or indicators of vulnerabilities related to MIPS information systems, and consent to having the contents of the communication and follow-up communications stored on MIPS’s systems.

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

  • Describe the vulnerability, where it 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).

Disclosure

MIPS is committed to timely correction of vulnerabilities. Accordingly, we require that you refrain from sharing information about discovered vulnerabilities for 90 calendar days after you have submitted 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.

Bug Bounty Payments

At this time, MIPS does not provide financial incentives for security researchers.