PayPal opens up bug bounty program to minors

PayPal is opening up its bug bounty program to individuals aged 14 and older, a move intended to reward younger researchers who are technically ineligible to hold full-fledged PayPal accounts.

PayPal's program, which is a year old this month, only applied to those 18 years and older. Under the old rule, participants in the program were required to hold valid accounts, which excluded minors, said Gus Anagnos, PayPal's director of information security.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Where are the kid coders? Not in U.S. schools. | Security expert Roger A. Grimes offers a guided tour of the latest threats and explains what you can do to stop them in "Fight Today's Malware," InfoWorld's Shop Talk video. | Keep up with key security issues with InfoWorld's Security Adviser blog and Security Central newsletter. ]

In May, 17-year-old Robert Kugler, a student in Germany, said he'd been denied a reward for finding a vulnerability. PayPal said the bug had already been found by two other researchers, which would have made Kugler ineligible for bounty.

In an apparent miscommunication, Kugler said he was initially told he was too young rather than the bug had already been discovered. Nonetheless, PayPal said it would look to bring younger people into its program, which pays upwards of $10,000 for remote code execution bugs on its websites.

Those who are under 18 years old can receive a bug bounty payment through a PayPal student account, an arrangement where a minor can receive payments via their parent's account, Anagnos said.

Anagnos said other terms and conditions have been modified to make its program more transparent, such as clarifying which PayPal subsidiaries and partner sites qualify for the program.

PayPal pays much less for vulnerabilities on partner websites, which have a URL form of "www.paypal-__.com." A remote execution bug found on that kind of site garners only $1,500 rather than up to $10,000 on the company's main sites.

Like other bug bounty programs run by companies such as Microsoft and Google, PayPal will publicly recognize researchers on its website with a "Wall of Fame" for the top 10 researchers in a quarter. Another "honorable mention" page lists anyone who submitted a valid bug for the quarter.

Eusebiu Blindu, a testing consultant from Romania, was one of the researchers listed on the Wall of Fame for the first quarter of this year.

"I think Paypal is the best bug bounty program, and I am glad I participated in it from the first days of its launching," he wrote on his blog.

Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk.

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Java 7 vulnerability opens door to 10-year-old attack

IDG News Service - Security researchers from Polish vulnerability research firm Security Explorations claim to have identified a new vulnerability in Java 7 that could allow attackers to bypass the software's security sandbox and execute arbitrary code on the underlying system.

The vulnerability was reported Thursday to Oracle along with proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code, said Adam Gowdiak, the CEO and founder of Security Explorations, in a message to the Full Disclosure mailing list.

According to Gowdiak, the vulnerability is located in the Reflection API (application programming interface), a feature that was introduced in Java 7 and which has been the source of many critical Java vulnerabilities so far. Security Explorations confirmed that its PoC exploit code works against Java SE 7 Update 25 and earlier versions, he said.

The new issue identified by Security Explorations can allow hackers to implement a "classic" attack that has been known for at least 10 years, Gowdiak said.

This kind of attack used to affect the Java virtual machine (VM) in its early days, in the late '90s, he said via email.

"It's one of those risks one should protect against in the first place when new features are added to Java at the core VM level," Gowdiak said. It is surprising to discover that protection against this type of attack was not implemented for the Reflection API when Java 7 was being developed, he said.

The researcher claims that the vulnerability allows attackers to violate a fundamental Java VM security feature -- the safety of its type system.

"As a result of the attack, one can conduct arbitrary cast operations between Java data types like an integer and a pointer," he said via email. "In Java, cast operations need to follow strict rules, so that memory is accessed in a safe way."

Gowdiak has criticized the implementation of the Reflection API in the past, saying that the feature doesn't seem to have been subjected to a thorough security review.

He believes that the presence of this new vulnerability in Java 7 raises questions about the effectiveness of Oracle's software security assurance and security-code review practices. "A huge pile of bugs go undetected by these policies and procedures," he said.

At the end of May, Nandini Ramani, Oracle's vice president of engineering for the Java Client and Mobile Platforms, reaffirmed in a blog post the company's commitment to strengthening the security of Java.

"The Java development team has expanded the use of automated security testing tools, facilitating regular coverage over large sections of Java platform code," Ramani said at the time. The team worked with Oracle's primary provider of source-code analysis services to make those tools more effective in the Java environment and developed so-called "fuzzing" analysis tools to weed out certain types of vulnerabilities, she said.

"Sophisticated analysis tools should not miss simple Reflection API flaws," Gowdiak said. "That should speak for itself."

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2012 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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