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.

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

If you encounter any of the following types of information on our systems while testing within the scope of this policy, please stop your test and notify us immediately at VDP@usitc.gov:

  • Personally identifiable information (e.g., Social Security number or email address)

  • Financial information (e.g., credit card or bank account numbers)

  • Proprietary information, confidential business information, or trade secrets
Scope

This policy applies to all USITC-managed systems and services that are accessible from the Internet. This includes the registered domain name usitc.gov.

  • *.usitc.gov
Reporting a vulnerability

Information submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – i.e., to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the USITC, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process. We will not share your name or contact information without your express permission.

We accept vulnerability reports through our bugcrowd program https://bugcrowd.com/usitc-vdp and questions can be directed to VDP@usitc.gov. Reports may be submitted anonymously. If you share contact information, we will acknowledge receipt of your report within 5 business days.

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.

The USITC appreciates and values input from external security researchers. However, the USITC is currently unable to provide formal attribution to external security researchers on their vulnerability disclosure submissions.

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 where 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.
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 we have received your report.

  • 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.
Questions

Please direct all questions regarding this policy to VDP@usitc.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.