EIP August Incentives

The mood here at Exodus Intelligence is excitement over the community reception of  our EIP program. We have had over 60 submissions in the past 6 weeks since we launched, and we have been able to purchase over 20% of the submissions.

That number might sound low, but it is no secret that we are a little more particular in what we pursue, as we are actually exploiting each acquisition. We also are looking to make the largest impact possible, by only pursuing vulns affecting common, and widely deployed software. To counter this selectiveness, we are paying our researchers almost double what is offered at similar programs, as we value the information, and the researchers.

Another notable difference in our program, is that we are striving for a much more appropriate turn around in our analysis (10 days maximum) and we promote interaction and communication with our researchers.

The purpose of this blog is not only to boast about our program, but to notify the research community, that we are planning on boosting our purchasing power for the month of August by the following factors:

    • Price Match Guarantee

We will beat any offer from any other vulnerability acquisition program for exploitable submissions that we consider valuable to our clients

 

 

    • Charitable Donation Matching

We will dollar for dollar match any researcher that chooses to donate an Exodus vulnerability offer to an industry supporting charity (such as EFF)

 

 

    • Researcher Appreciation Multiplier

All offers we make for vulnerabilities submitted during the month of August will receive an additional 25% bonus

 

We are very grateful for our researchers, and we strive to make EIP the best program possible. To keep interest from the community and our researchers, we plan to periodically have incentive months similar to this. We will feel out how this month goes to determine what we will do next, and we are open for suggestions from the community on ideas for future incentives.

 

Announcing the Exodus Intelligence Program

We are excited to announce that the Exodus Intelligence Program is now accepting submissions!

The EIP was designed by those with a long history both discovering vulnerabilities as well as procuring them through various acquisition programs. Our collective experience has allowed us to architect the EIP such that it is appealing to those who have the skill and desire to receive compensation for their research.

All vulnerabilities purchased through the EIP will be disclosed to the affected vendor(s) for remediation.

Some of the benefits for researchers participating in the EIP include a 10 business day decision timeline, starting when a submission is first received. We also intend to maintain a highly transparent program whereby our analysts are reachable by the contributing researchers for any questions. For those submissions we do procure, we will provide the researcher who sent it in with our internal analysis as to the root cause and exploitability because we believe it is essential to give back to and aid our researchers in their pursuit of knowledge.

As Exodus Intelligence does not support any products of our own, we are interested not only in code execution issues, but also vulnerabilities that other acquisition programs may not be (local vulnerabilities, memory disclosures, techniques).

One of the main focuses of Exodus is to provide information to our customers on vulnerabilities we believe are not only exploitable, but likely to be exploited. While this means we may be turning down submissions that are simply theoretically exploitable, it also means we are able to better compensate researchers for the work we are interested in.

There is a FAQ available on the EIP website, but if you have any specific questions feel free to e-mail us at eip@exodusintel.com (PGP).

For more generic questions or press inquiries, please use info@exodusintel.com (PGP).

 

Posted by: Aaron Portnoy, Zef Cekaj, Logan Brown, Brandon Edwards