Ride the Lightning

Microsoft Introduces ElectionGuard Bounty Program

November 7, 2019

Following this year's elections, here's a great recent post from Microsoft describing its ElectionGuard Bounty Program, which was launched on October 19^th.

Back in May, Microsoft announced the release of ElectionGuard, a free open-source SDK to make voting more secure, transparent, and accessible. ElectionGuard enables end-to-end verification of elections, open results to third-party organizations for secure validation, and allows individual voters to confirm their votes were correctly counted. The ElectionGuard Bounty program invites security researchers to partner with Microsoft to secure ElectionGuard users and is a part of Microsoft's broader commitment to preserving and protecting electoral processes under the Defending Democracy Program.

Researchers from across the globe, whether full time cyber security professionals, part-time hobbyists, or students, are invited to discover high impact vulnerabilities in targeted areas of the ElectionGuard SDK and share them with Microsoft under Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD). Eligible submissions with a clear, concise proof of concept (POC) are eligible for awards up to US$15,000.

Bug bounty programs are common among technology companies, where they are used to incentivize the identification and coordinated disclosure of security vulnerabilities. Bug bounty programs have been implemented by many organizations, including the Department of Defense, United Airlines, Twitter, Google, Apple, Microsoft and many others.

We need all the help we can get Microsoft. Thanks for stepping up to the plate!

Hat tip to Dave Ries.

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