Our Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Policy (CVD)

Why Coordinated?

The IT-community has shown great willingness to share knowledge and experience. Our goal is seeking cooperation with this community to help to improve the overall security of systems. As our solutions are defending our industry also all our customers will benefit from this community.

The aim of CVD is to contribute to the security of IT systems by sharing knowledge about vulnerabilities. In CVD, knowledge is shared with one or more potentially vulnerable organisations in order to arrive at a joint solution for the vulnerability found in collaboration with the reporting party. It is important that the organisations affected, have sufficient time to remedy any vulnerabilities or protect systems in order to limit or prevent loss or damage as much as possible. The cornerstone of the process is disclosure of knowledge about the vulnerabilities after remediation. It is essential in CVD that all parties comply with agreements on how to report a vulnerability and how to deal with it.

It may be important to inform several parties at the same time if a vulnerability affects many systems. In that case, the BSI or other parties within the security community can support the CVD process from a coordinating role.

Our Responsible Disclosure Policy

At sematicon AG, we consider the security of our systems a top priority. But no matter how much effort we put into system security, there can still be vulnerabilities present. If you discover a vulnerability, we would like to know about it so we can take steps to address it as quickly as possible. We would like to ask you to help us better protect our customers and our systems.

Please do the following:

• E-mail your findings to our SRT-Team. Encrypt your findings using our PGP key to prevent this critical information from falling into the wrong hands.
• Do not take advantage of the vulnerability or problem you have discovered, for example by downloading more data than necessary to demonstrate the vulnerability or deleting or modifying other people’s data.
• Do not create tools for exploiting vulnerabilities and offer them e.g. on dark-net markets, which third parties can use to commit criminal offenses.
• Do not reveal the problem to others until it has been resolved.
• The vulnerability report is not the result of automated tools or scans without explanatory documentation. These do not constitute valid vulnerability reports.
• Do not use attacks on physical security, social engineering, distributed denial of service, spam or applications of third parties.
• Do provide sufficient information to reproduce the problem, so we will be able to resolve it as quickly as possible. Usually, the IP address or the URL of the affected system and a description of the vulnerability will be sufficient, but complex vulnerabilities may require further explanation.
• Please do provide valid contact details. Particularly in the case of complex vulnerabilities, it cannot be ruled out that we will require further explanations and documentation.

What we promise:

• We will respond to your report within 5 business days with our evaluation of the report and an expected resolution date
• If you have followed the instructions above, we will never take any legal action against you in regard to the report
• We will handle your report with strict confidentiality, and not pass on your personal details to third parties without your permission
• We will keep you informed of the progress towards resolving the problem
• In the public information concerning the problem reported, we will give your name as the discoverer of the problem (unless you desire otherwise), and
• As a token of our gratitude for your assistance, we offer a reward for every report of a security problem that was not yet known to us. The amount of the reward will be determined based on the severity of the leak and the quality of the report.

We strive to resolve all problems as quickly as possible, and we would like to play an active role in the ultimate publication on the problem after it is resolved.