Vulnerability Disclosure Policy

The strength and vitality of the U.S. economy depends directly on effective mechanisms that protect new ideas and investments in innovation and creativity. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO” or ‘we”) is committed to ensuring that the data stored within all USPTO systems is safe and secure. This commitment can be fulfilled not only by the dedicated staff of the USPTO, but also by external researchers with the right expertise. This policy is intended to give those security researchers (“security researcher” or “you”) clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.

This policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we require security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.

We encourage security researchers to contact us when reporting potential vulnerabilities discovered in the systems within the scope of this policy via the methods below.

Guidelines

Once a security researcher has established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including personally identifiable information, financial information, or proprietary information to include trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, submit a vulnerability report via USPTO’s publicly hosted vulnerability disclosure form, and not disclose this data to anyone else.

Under this policy, “research” includes activities in which you:

Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue or encounter any sensitive data.
Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.
Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish persistent command line access, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.
Provide us 90 calendar days to resolve the issue before you disclose it publicly.
If you decide to publicly disclose a vulnerability, after the 90 calendar days, provide us 7 business day notice prior to public disclosure
Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports (reports with insufficient information to take action).

Authorization

If you as a security researcher, make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during the security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, will work with you to understand and resolve the issue, and USPTO will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known to such third party.

Scope

This policy applies to the following systems and services:

*.uspto.gov

Any service not expressly listed above, such as any connected services, are excluded from scope and are not authorized for testing. Additionally, vulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any).

Though we develop and maintain other internet-accessible systems or services, we ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We may alter the scope of this policy over time.

This policy is intended to apply to security researchers (“you”).

The following test types are NOT authorized:

Network denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data
Physical testing (e.g. office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing
Remote Code Execution (RCE), in which ANY code is run remotely on a target machine.

Reporting vulnerabilities

Information submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities.

We accept vulnerability reports via this form.

If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely USPTO, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission, except for disclosures required by law.

Reports may be submitted anonymously. If you share contact information, we will acknowledge receipt of your report within 3 business days.

By submitting a vulnerability, you acknowledge that you have no expectation of payment and that you expressly waive any future pay claims against the U.S. Government related to your submission.

What we would like to see from you

Provide the location (hostname/URL) the vulnerability was discovered and the potential impact of exploitation.
Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots are helpful).
Provide us 90 calendar days to resolve the issue before you disclose it publicly.
If you decide to publicly disclose a vulnerability, after the 90 calendar days, provide us 7 business day notice prior to public disclosure
Be in English, if possible.

What you can expect from us

When you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible in a manner that is consistent with applicable law.Within three business days, we will acknowledge receipt of your report.

Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.
To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you within 90 days. We will be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.
We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.

Questions regarding this policy may be sent to uspto-vdp@submit.bugcrowd.com.