Understanding Safe Harbor and Service Level Agreements
John Jackson · 2021
Safe harbors contain legal jargon and can seem intimidating, especially when it's the program's responsibility to at least work up a simple safe harbor clause. Most modern-day bug bounty platforms allow a program manager to use a templated safe harbor agreement, and in all actuality that's all a safe harbor is: a templated nonaction clause. Program managers need to heed the safe harbor recommendation. Attack patterns can be analyzed via security information and event management logs or the web application security firewall, and hopefully at this point a program has not been established without these key tools. A service level agreement is the enterprise's promise to a researcher to respond to or to fix the reported vulnerability in an adequate amount of time.