A Quick Analysis of Facebook Bug Bounty Program

(v2, updated 10/15/2014)

Nowadays, Web companies have been relying on vulnerability reward programs (VRP, also called bug bounty programs) to discover vulnerabilities in their products. Basically, a white hat (good hacker) can submit a vulnerability discovery report and then get some money back. We have written a preliminary paper analyzing a related program called Wooyun, and please take a look if you are in general interested in this new paradigm of improving security.

Facebook is one of the companies that embrace this idea, although Facebook is generous sometime (see this and this), :P. FB also hides information about what vulnerabilities have been discovered, or the details of each white hat's accomplishment (e.g. how many vulnerabilities one has discovered, and when). FB only provides a list of white hats who have contributed to Facebook security every year, at this page.

Anyway, we can start with this page and do some quick analysis. The data is obtained by 9/20/2014. First, there are 670 names on the list (there are several cases when multiple names appear in one line and separated by commas, and we will count each name alone). Quite a lot, isn't it? But it is possible that some enthusiastic white hats contributed every year and leave their name multiple times, so we also count the number of unique names, which is 516.

Next, we count the number of white hats each year, shown in the following table:

Time	White Hat Count
2014 (up to 9.20)	191
2013	255
2012	126
2011	55
Prior to 2011	43

We clearly see the trend: more and more players are joining this game, and the number roughly doubles every year:) I guess VRP is really a promising idea (please see our paper for more discussions).

There is also an interesting fact: a lot of white hats are only active in one year. To show this, we create another table counting the white hats based on number of years being active:

Number Years being Active	White Hat Count
1	402
2	82
3	26
4	5
>=5	1

So far, there are 402 who have only appeared in one year's thank list. And we can see that the white hat count distribution is highly skewed. Much few white hats are active for more than one year. And there is only one person who has been thanked all the time! This probably shows that the value of this kind of VRP not only lies in a few experts, but also in a large number of people. But since we don't know how many vulnerabilities each white hat contributes and the severity of them, the conclusion is hard to make. Still, this observation is consistent with what we claim in our paper.

You might wonder who is the "all the time" person, and the answer is: Szymon Gruszecki. You can access his personal page here.

Please feel free to discuss by leaving a message. Thank you for your time!


Update:

Facebook has released some interesting statistics of its bounty program here:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-bug-bounty/bug-bounty-highlights-and-updates/818902394790655

Some interesting points:

• From the statics we see that there is a huge number of invalid reports. The valid rate is only 4.7%. Why?
• It says that "One of the most encouraging trends we've observed is that repeat submitters usually improve over time. It's not uncommon for a researcher who has submitted non-security or low-severity issues to later find valuable bugs that lead to higher rewards." Actually, we plan to investigate this issue further in our data set.
• The country rank: Russia -> India -> USA -> Brazil  -> UK

References

[1] The picture. http://america.aljazeera.com/content/dam/ajam/images/shows/Real%20Money%20with%20Ali%20Velshi/SG_FB2_1460.jpg