Chainlink

Program Overview

Chainlink is the industry-standard Web3 services platform. It has enabled trillions of dollars in transaction volume across DeFi, on-chain finance, gaming, NFTs, and other major industries. As the leading decentralized oracle network, Chainlink empowers developers to build feature-rich Web3 applications with seamless access to real-world data and off-chain computation across any blockchain and provides global enterprises with a universal gateway to all blockchains.

Learn more about Chainlink by visiting chain.link or reading the developer documentation at docs.chain.link. To discuss an integration, reach out to an expert.

Responsible Publication

Chainlink adheres to category 3. This Policy determines what information whitehats 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

Chainlink adheres to the Primacy of Impact, meaning that if you believe you have found a bug that causes an “In-scope Impact”, even if the affected system is not strictly within the assets listed, we still encourage you to submit it to the program for consideration. Chainlink adheres to the Primacy of Impact for the following severity levels:

• Smart Contract - Critical
• Smart Contract - High
• Websites and Applications - Critical
• Websites and Applications - High

Known Issue Assurance

If an issue is closed as a known issue (which Chainlink has never done), proof will be provided to Immunefi for them to validate the veracity of the claim. When this is provided and accepted by Immunefi, the bug will no longer be eligible for payout regardless of severity.

Rewards are distributed according to the impact of the vulnerability based on the Immunefi Vulnerability Severity Classification System V2.2. This is a simplified 5-level scale, with separate scales for websites/apps, smart contracts, and blockchains/DLTs, focusing on the impact of the vulnerability reported.

All Smart Contracts bug reports require a proof of concept (PoC) and a suggestion for a fix to be eligible for a reward. All Websites and Applications bug reports must come with a PoC with an end-effect impacting an asset in scope in order to be considered for a reward. Explanations and statements are not accepted as PoCs and code is required.

Rewards for Critical Smart Contract vulnerabilities are at the sole and exclusive discretion of Chainlink Labs, with maximum reward of USD $3,000,000.

Specific reward amounts are determined based on a number of factors, such as the impact of proposed issues, ease of exploitability, and how likely the exploit conditions might occur.

Any supplementary reward beyond the minimum for the assigned criticality rating is at the discretion of Chainlink Labs.

KYC requirement

To ensure compliance, Chainlink Labs requires Know-Your-Customer (KYC) information to be provided for all bug bounty reporters submitting a report and requesting a reward.

The information required:

• Color copy of passport

  • Full Legal Name (First, middle, and last, plus any prefix, and/or suffix)

• Proof of current address (either a redacted bank statement with your address or a recent utility bill with your name, address, and issuer of the bill)

• If you are a U.S. citizen, permanent resident, partnership, LLC, corporation, estate or trust, please send a filled-out and signed W-9 (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf)

• If you are not a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, please send a filled-out and signed W-8BEN for individual and W-8 BEN-E for entities (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw8ben.pdf; https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw8bene.pdf), and provide statement to certify that all services are performed outside of the U.S.

• Ethereum Wallet Address (for transfer of payment)

All bug bounty reporters must pass the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) Specially Designated Nationals And Blocked Persons List (SDN) list screening. Rewards cannot be paid out if reporters are on the OFAC SDN list.

The collection and review of this information will be handled by the Chainlink Labs team directly.

Payouts are handled by the Chainlink Labs team directly, denominated in USD, and sent in Ethereum (ETH) or USD Coin (USDC).

Feasibility Requirement and Limitations

Chainlink will take the feasibility of an attack into consideration when determining if and how much a reported issue receives as a bounty. More information on feasibility limitations can be found under Immunefi’s Feasibility Standards.

Repeatable Attacks

In the event a report applies to multiple contracts or can be triggered multiple times, if a contract or product can be paused (either through on or off-chain means) only the impact of the first usage will be considered. If a product is not pausable such that there is no realistic way to prevent repeated usage of the attack, the entire amount at risk will be considered when evaluating impact.

The following are considered out of scope for the program:

• Any files in a dev folder
• Any contract with a typeAndVersion string which contains -dev
• Any files with XXX in their name
• Any *.smartcontract.com assets
• Any test code

Also, for any file to be in scope, it has to be part of a release, not including pre-releases.

If an impact can be caused to any other asset managed by Chainlink that isn’t on this table but for which the impact is in the Impacts in Scope section below, you are encouraged to submit it for consideration by the project.

Only the following impacts are accepted within this bug bounty program. All other impacts are out of scope, even if they affect an in scope asset.

The following vulnerabilities are excluded from the rewards for this bug bounty program:

• Attacks that the reporter has already exploited themselves, leading to damage
• Attacks requiring access to leaked keys/credentials
• Attacks requiring access to privileged addresses (governance, strategist)
• 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

Smart Contracts

• Incorrect data supplied by third party oracles
  • Not to exclude oracle manipulation/flash loan attacks
• Basic economic governance attacks (e.g. 51% attack)
• Lack of liquidity
• Best practice critiques
• Sybil attacks
• Centralization risks

Websites and Apps

• Theoretical vulnerabilities without any proof or demonstration
• Attacks requiring physical access to the victim device
• Attacks requiring access to the local network of the victim
• Reflected plain text injection ex: url parameters, path, etc.
  • This does not exclude reflected HTML injection with or without javascript
  • This does not exclude persistent plain text injection
• Self-XSS
• Captcha bypass using OCR without impact demonstration
• CSRF with no state modifying security impact (ex: logout CSRF)
• 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
• Vulnerabilities used only to enumerate or confirm the existence of users or tenants
• Vulnerabilities requiring un-prompted, in-app user actions that are not part of the normal app workflows
• Lack of SSL/TLS best practices
• DDoS vulnerabilities
• Feature requests
• Issues related to the frontend without concrete impact and PoC
• Best practices issues without concrete impact and PoC
• Vulnerabilities primarily caused by browser/plugin defects
• Leakage of non sensitive api keys ex: etherscan, Infura, Alchemy, etc.
• Any vulnerability exploit requiring browser bugs for exploitation. ex: CSP bypass

The following activities are prohibited by this bug bounty program:

• Any testing with mainnet or public testnet contracts; all testing should be done on private testnets
• 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
• Automated testing of services that generates significant amounts of traffic
• Public disclosure of an unpatched vulnerability in an embargoed bounty
• Disclosure of vulnerabilities will require the approval of the Chainlink team