Last week at Black Hat USA, Ivan Krstić, Apple's head of security engineering and architecture, announced a massive expansion of the company's bug-bounty program. In addition to expanding the program from iOS to all of Apple's operating systems, the new program dramatically increases the bounties on offer, to a maximum of $1.5 million under certain circumstances.
"Apple is demonstrating that it understands the importance of finding bugs, not just when they’re in the hands of customers, but also in the production cycle," says Casey Ellis, CTO and founder of Bugcrowd. He points out that Apple now finds itself competing with offensive exploit buyers — those who will pay researchers for exploits that they will then use against victims in the real world.
"Most other industry players don't face this hurdle, and this in combination with their focus on product security is a telling sign of why payouts are so large," Ellis says. "The skills to find the types of bugs Apple is targeting are rare and often tied up in the offensive market, and this is another indication of why payouts are high."
Apple has long had a bug-reporting program for iOS but has limited payouts for exploits in other systems to a relative handful of prescreened and invited researchers. Now the program will be applied to macOS, tvOS, and watchOS as well as iOS.
While impressive, the bounties are not the only part of the enhanced program. Apple also announced the iOS Security Research Device Program — specially unlocked iPhones available to certain invited researchers who will be able to use the devices to find vulnerabilities and develop exploits. The security research devices are intended to be authorized, officia ..
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