Cardano Foundation

The Cardano Foundation is tasked with advancing the public digital infrastructure Cardano, working to anchor it as a utility for financial and social systems. We develop infrastructure tooling—including where there may not be an immediate commercial use case—plus strengthen operational resilience, and drive diversity of on-infrastructure use cases as well as the development of sound and representative governance.

For more information about The Cardano Foundation, please visit https://cardanofoundation.org/.

The Cardano Foundation provides rewards in fiat USD. For more details about the payment process, please view the Rewards by Threat Level section further below.

Responsible Publication

The Cardano Foundation adheres to category 3 - Approval Required. This Policy determines what information researchers are allowed to make public from their submitted bug reports. For more information about the category selected, please refer to our Responsible Publication page.

Primacy of Impact vs Primacy of Rules

The Cardano Foundation adheres to the Primacy of Rules, which means that the whole bug bounty program is run strictly under the terms and conditions stated within this page.

Proof of Concept (PoC) Requirements

A PoC, demonstrating the bug's impact, is required for this program and has to comply with the Immunefi PoC Guidelines and Rules.

Known Issue Assurance

The Cardano Foundation commits to providing Known Issue Assurance to bug submissions through their program. This means that The Cardano Foundation will either disclose known issues publicly, or at the very least, privately via a self-reported bug submission.

In a potential scenario of a mediation, this allows for a more objective and streamlined process, in order to prove that an issue is known. Otherwise, assuming the bug report is valid, it would result in the report being considered as in-scope, and due a reward.

Public Disclosure of Known Issues

Bug reports covering previously-discovered bugs (listed below) are not eligible for a reward within this program. This includes known issues that the project is aware of but has consciously decided not to “fix”, necessary code changes, or any implemented operational mitigating procedures that can lessen potential risk.

• https://github.com/cardano-foundation/cf-explorer-api
• https://github.com/cardano-foundation/cf-explorer-authentication
• https://github.com/cardano-foundation/cf-explorer-frontend

Feasibility Limitations

The project may be receiving reports that are valid (the bug and attack vector are real) and cite assets and impacts that are in scope, but there may be obstacles or barriers to executing the attack in the real world. In other words, there is a question about how feasible the attack really is. Conversely, there may also be mitigation measures that projects can take to prevent the impact of the bug, which are not feasible or would require unconventional action and hence, should not be used as reasons for downgrading a bug's severity.

Therefore, Immunefi has developed a set of feasibility limitation standards which by default states what security researchers, as well as projects, can or cannot cite when reviewing a bug report.

Reward Payment Terms

Payouts are handled by the Cardano Foundation team directly and are denominated in USD. However, payments are done in fiat USD via Bank Transfer. This bug bounty program will also have a hard cap of USD 100,000. In the event that multiple bug reports are submitted that exceed this amount, the rewards will be provided on a first come first served basis. All remaining valid reports will have their rewards considered on a case by case basis.

Cardano Foundation codebase can be found at https://github.com/cardano-foundation/cardano-wallet. Documentation and further resources can be found on https://cardanofoundation.org/en/resources/.

These impacts are out of scope for this bug bounty program.

All Categories:

• Impacts requiring attacks that the reporter has already exploited themselves, leading to damage
• Impacts caused by attacks requiring access to leaked keys/credentials
• Impacts caused by attacks requiring access to privileged addresses (governance, strategist) except in such cases where the contracts are intended to have no privileged access to functions that make the attack possible
• Impacts relying on attacks involving the depegging of an external stablecoin where the attacker does not directly cause the depegging due to a bug in code
• Mentions of secrets, access tokens, API keys, private keys, etc. in Github will be considered out of scope without proof that they are in-use in production
• Best practice recommendations
• Feature requests
• Impacts on test files and configuration files unless stated otherwise in the bug bounty program

Websites and Apps

• Theoretical impacts without any proof or demonstration
• Impacts involving attacks requiring physical access to the victim device
• Impacts involving attacks requiring access to the local network of the victim
• Reflected plain text injection (e.g. url parameters, path, etc.)
  • This does not exclude reflected HTML injection with or without JavaScript
  • This does not exclude persistent plain text injection
• Any impacts involving self-XSS
• Captcha bypass using OCR without impact demonstration
• CSRF with no state modifying security impact (e.g. logout CSRF)
• Impacts related to missing HTTP Security Headers (such as X-FRAME-OPTIONS) or cookie security flags (such as “httponly”) without demonstration of impact
• Server-side non-confidential information disclosure, such as IPs, server names, and most stack traces
• Impacts causing only the enumeration or confirmation of the existence of users or tenants
• Impacts caused by vulnerabilities requiring un-prompted, in-app user actions that are not part of the normal app workflows
• Lack of SSL/TLS best practices
• Impacts that only require DDoS
• UX and UI impacts that do not materially disrupt use of the platform
• Impacts primarily caused by browser/plugin defects
• Leakage of non sensitive API keys (e.g. Etherscan, Infura, Alchemy, etc.)
• Any vulnerability exploit requiring browser bugs for exploitation (e.g. CSP bypass)
• SPF/DMARC misconfigured records)
• Missing HTTP Headers without demonstrated impact
• Automated scanner reports without demonstrated impact
• UI/UX best practice recommendations
• Non-future-proof NFT rendering
• Disclosure of any wallets publicly displayed in non-protected section of the explorer

Prohibited Activities:

• Any testing on mainnet or public testnet deployed code; all testing should be done on local-forks of either public testnet or mainnet
• Any testing with pricing oracles or third-party smart contracts
• Attempting phishing or other social engineering attacks against our employees and/or customers
• Any testing with third-party systems and applications (e.g. browser extensions) as well as websites (e.g. SSO providers, advertising networks)
• Any denial of service attacks that are executed against project assets
• Automated testing of services that generates significant amounts of traffic
• Public disclosure of an unpatched vulnerability in an embargoed bounty