Ethical hacking comes with legal risks

Its not just the lack of a steady income. Security researchers also face legal risks from anti-hacking laws, such as the UK’s Computer Misuse Act and the US’s draconian Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

When Moussouris joined Microsoft in 2007, she persuaded the company to announce that it would not prosecute bounty hunters if they found online vulnerabilities in Microsoft products and reported them responsibly. Other software companies have since followed suit.

The UK government has now recognised the problem and promised to introduce a statutory defence for cyber security researchers who spot and share vulnerabilities to protect them from prosecution.

Another issue is that many software companies insist on security researchers signing a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) before paying them for their vulnerability disclosures.

This flies against the best practices for security disclosures, which Moussouris has championed through the International Standards Organisation (ISO).

When software companies pay the first person to discover a vulnerability a bounty in return for signing an NDA, that creates an incentive for those who find the same vulnerability to publicly disclose it, increasing the risk that a bad actor will exploit it for criminal purposes.

Worse, some companies use NDAs to keep vulnerabilities hidden but don’t take steps to fix them, says Moussouris, whose company, Luta Security, manages and advises on bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure programmes.

“We often see a big pile of unfixed bugs,” she says. “And some of these programmes are well funded by publicly traded companies that have plenty of cyber security employees, application security engineers and funding.”

Some companies appear to regard bug bounties as a replacement for secure coding and proper investment in software testing.

“We are using bug bounties as a stop-gap, as a way to potentially control the public disclosure of bugs, and we are not using them to identify symptoms that can diagnose our deeper lack of security controls,” she adds.

Ultimately, Moussouris says, governments will have to step in and change laws to make software companies liable for errors in their software, in much the same way car manufacturers are responsible for safety flaws in their vehicles.

“All governments have pretty much held off on holding software companies responsible and legally liable, because they wanted to encourage the growth of their industry,” she says. “But that has to change at a certain point, like automobiles were not highly regulated, and then seatbelts were required by law.”

AI could lead to less secure code

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) could make white hat hackers redundant altogether, but perhaps not in a way that leads to better software security.

All of the major bug bounty platforms in the US are using AI to help with the triage of vulnerabilities and to augment penetration testing.

An AI-powered penetration testing platform, XBow, recently topped the bug bounty leaderboard by using AI to focus on relatively easy-to-find vulnerabilities and testing likely candidates in a systematic way to harvest security bugs.

“Once we create the tools to train AI to make it appear to be as good, or better in a lot of cases, than humans, you are pulling the rug out of the market. And then where are we going to get the next bug bounty expert?” she asks.

The current generation of experts with the skills to spot when AI systems are missing something important is in danger of disappearing.

“Bug bounty platforms are moving towards an automated, driverless version of bug bounties, where AI agents are going to take the place of human bug hunters,” she says.

Unfortunately, it’s far easier for AI to find software bugs than it is to use AI to fix them. And companies are not investing as much as they should in using AI to mitigate security risks.

“We have to figure out how to change that equation very quickly. It is easier to find and report a bug than it is for AI to write and test a patch,” she says.

Bug bounties have failed

Moussouris, a passionate and enthusiastic advocate of bug bounty schemes, is the first to acknowledge that bug bounty schemes have, in one sense, failed.

Some things have improved. Software developers have shifted to better programming languages and frameworks that make it harder to introduce particular classes of vulnerability, such as cross-site scripting errors.

But there is, she suggests, too much security theatre. Companies still address faults because they are visible, but hold off fixing things that the public can’t see, or use non-disclosure agreements to buy silence from researchers to keep vulnerabilities from the public.

Moussouris believes that AI will ultimately take over from human bug researchers, but says the loss of expertise will damage security.

The world is on the verge of another industrial revolution, but it will be bigger and faster than the last industrial revolution. In the 19th century, people left agriculture to work long hours in factories, often in dangerous conditions for poor wages.

As AI takes over more tasks currently carried out by people, unemployment will rise, incomes will fall and economies risk stagnation, Moussouris predicts.

The only answer, she believes, is for governments to tax AI companies and use the proceeds to provide the population with a universal basic income (UBI). “I think it has to, or literally there will be no way for capitalism to survive,” she says. “The good news is that human engineering ingenuity is still intact for now. I still believe in our ability to hack our way out of this problem.”

Growing tensions between governments and bug bounty hunters

The work of bug bounty hunters has also been impacted by moves to require software technology companies to report vulnerabilities to governments before they fix them.

It began with China in 2021, which required tech companies to disclose new vulnerabilities within 48 hours of discovery.

“It was very clear that they were going to evaluate whether or not they were going to use vulnerabilities for offensive purposes,” says Moussouris.

In 2020, the European Union (EU) introduced the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), which introduced similar disclosure obligations, ostensibly to allow European government to prepare their cyber defences.

Moussouris is a co-author of the ISO standard on vulnerability disclosure. One of its principles is to limit the knowledge of security bugs to the smallest number of people before they are fixed.

The EU argues that its approach will be safe because it is not asking for a deep technical explanation of the vulnerabilities, nor is it asking for proof-of-concept code to show how vulnerabilities can be exploited.

But that misses the point, says Moussouris. Widening the pool of people with access to information about vulnerabilities will make leaks more likely and raises the risk that criminal hackers or hostile nation-states will exploit them for crime or espionage.

Risk from hostile nations

Moussouris does not doubt that hostile nations will exploit the weakest links in government bug notification schemes to learn new security exploits. If they are already using those vulnerabilities for offensive hacking, they will be able to cover their tracks.

“I anticipate there will be an upheaval in the threat intelligence landscape because our adversaries absolutely know this law is going to take effect. They are certainly positioning themselves to learn about these things through the leakiest party that gets notified,” she says.

“And they will either start targeting that particular software, if they weren’t already, or start pulling back their operations or hiding their tracks if they were the ones using it. It’s counterproductive,” she adds.

Moussouris is concerned that the US will likely follow the EU by introducing its own bug reporting scheme. “I am just holding my breath, anticipating that the US is going to follow, but I have been warning them against it.”

The UK’s equities programme

In the UK, GCHQ regulates government use of security vulnerabilities for spying through a process known as the equities scheme.

That involves security experts weighing up whether the UK would place its own critical systems at risk if it failed to notify software suppliers of potential exploits against the potential value of the exploit for gathering intelligence.

The process has a veneer of rationality, but it falls down because, in practice, government experts can have no idea how widespread vulnerabilities are in the critical national infrastructure. Even large suppliers like Microsoft have trouble tracking where their own products are used.

“When I was working at Microsoft, it was very clear that while Microsoft had a lot of visibility into what was deployed in the world, there were tonnes of things out there that they wouldn’t know about until they were exploited,” she says.

“The fact that Microsoft, with all its telemetry ability to know where its customers are, struggled means there is absolutely no way to gauge in a reliable way how vulnerable we are,” she adds.

Kate Moussouris spoke to Computer Weekly at the SANS CyberThreat Summit.