The Stellar Bug Bounty Program provides bounties for vulnerabilities and exploits discovered in Stellar Development Foundation maintained repositories, services, and infrastructure. We recognize the importance of our community and security researchers in helping identify bugs and issues. We encourage responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities through the bug bounty program described on this page.
Responsible Disclosure
Our development team may take up to 90 days to implement a fix based on the severity of the report. Please allow this process to fully complete before publicly disclosing a vulnerability.
Rewards
We reward researchers who find valid security issues with a bounty paid in lumens (XLM). The Stellar.org Bug Bounty Panel evaluates award size using technical severity calculated with CVSS v3.1 Base Score together with business impact, such as the affected asset, the number of impacted participants, the sensitivity of exposed data, and the financial or reputational consequences to the network. Reports with higher business impact may receive higher rewards than reports with lower business impact, even when the technical severity is the same. Final awards are determined at the sole discretion of the panel.
- Critical: 0 to 25 000 points
- High: 0 to 15 000 points
- Medium: 0 to 10 000 points
- Low: 0 to 2 000 points
- Note: 0 to 500 points
1 point currently corresponds to 1 USD, payable in lumens (XLM), though this may change without prior notice.
Researchers are more likely to earn a larger reward by demonstrating how a vulnerability can be exploited to its maximum practical impact.
To receive a payout, researchers must successfully complete valid KYC before payment is issued.
Eligibility
Generally speaking, any bug that poses a significant vulnerability to the security or integrity of Stellar Development Foundation maintained applications, services, or infrastructure could be eligible for a reward. However, it is entirely at our discretion to decide whether a bug is significant enough to qualify.
In general, anything with the potential for financial loss or data breach is considered sufficiently severe, including:
- Implementation bugs that can lead to financial loss
- Access to our production servers
- Remote Code Execution
- Crash bugs in Stellar-RPC or Horizon, for example a bug that can crash the application by sending a special request, not by sending thousands of requests
The following reports are submitted very often and will generally be marked as Not Applicable:
- SPF or DMARC issues
- CORS headers on endpoints that are intentionally accessible from other domains
- Issues with third party services we use, such as Mailgun or Segment
- Logout CSRF
- Vulnerabilities in third party libraries without a working exploit against our applications or servers
- Publicly readable AWS S3 buckets containing Stellar ledger history, because this data is public
- Content Delivery Network bypass
In general, the following would not meet the threshold for severity and may be marked as Not Applicable:
- Version disclosure
- Missing security headers
- Cookies without the
secure flag
- Recently disclosed 0-day vulnerabilities without demonstrated impact to our environment
- Vulnerabilities on sites hosted by third parties unless they lead to a vulnerability on an in-scope Stellar property
- Vulnerabilities that depend on physical access, social engineering, spam, or DDoS
- Vulnerabilities affecting outdated or unpatched browsers
- Vulnerabilities in third party applications that make use of Stellar APIs
- Reports that have not been responsibly investigated and documented
- Bugs already known to us, or already reported by another researcher, where the reward goes to the first valid reporter
- Issues that are not reproducible
- Issues that we cannot reasonably be expected to remediate
- Archived GitHub repositories or projects
- GitHub repository forks
Scope
This HackerOne program covers SDF maintained open-source repositories, services, applications, and websites.
In scope
Open-source repositories:
- All open-source projects under the Stellar GitHub organization, unless a repository explicitly states that it is out of scope or is covered by a separate security program
Online services, apps, and websites:
Out of scope
- Archived GitHub repositories and projects
- GitHub repository forks
- Repositories that explicitly state they are out of scope
- Vulnerabilities affecting the Stellar protocol
- Repositories, services, or assets covered by the separate Immunefi program
- Any repositories or assets explicitly listed as out of scope in the Immunefi program, including:
Best Practices
- Please use your local instance of Horizon or Stellar-RPC and a separate network, not testnet or pubnet, when researching security bugs where possible. For example, you can use our Docker image. Blockchains are public, and someone may observe your findings and report a bug before you do.
- For issues that depend on a specific runtime or environment, we strongly encourage a containerized Proof of Concept, such as a Dockerfile, when it materially improves reproducibility.
Submission Requirements
All reports, regardless of severity, must include:
- A description of the vulnerability and the affected asset
- Step by step reproduction, also known as a Proof of Concept (PoC), including actual requests, responses, or an exploit script
- A clear impact statement tied to confidentiality, integrity, or availability
- Evidence that the issue is reproducible, such as screenshots, logs, transaction IDs, or a minimal working script
Reports submitted without a sufficient PoC will be triaged as Needs More Info and will not be eligible for payout until a sufficient PoC is provided.
Report a Bug
- Submit your report at https://hackerone.com/stellar/reports/new
- Include as much detail as possible, including a description of the issue, its potential impact, and clear reproduction steps or a Proof of Concept
- Please allow 3 business days for an initial response before following up
Legal
You may not participate in this program if you are a resident of, or are located in, a country that appears on any U.S. sanctions list.
