Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure

At Aafje we find the safety of our own systems very important. Despite our concern for the security of our systems, it is possible that there is a weak spot.

If you have found a weak spot in one of our systems, we would like to hear this so that we can take measures (together with our partner Z-CERT) as soon as possible. We would like to work with you to better protect our participants and our systems. If you comply with our Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure policy we have no reason to take legal action against you regarding the reported vulnerability.

We ask you to:

  • Make sure that your findings are in scope. Further on this page you can check what is considered to be out-of-scope.
  • Please use this CVD-form to send your findings to , encrypted with our PGP-key.
  • Provide adequate information to allow us to investigate and reproduce the vulnerability. Fill out every aspect of the CVD-form. This helps to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. An IP address or URL of the affected system with a description of the vulnerability will usually be sufficient, although more information might be necessary for more complex vulnerabilities. You may add a proof of concept.
  • Do not exploit vulnerabilities, e.g. by downloading more data than is needed to demonstrate the vulnerability, looking into third-party data, deleting or modifying data.
  • If you suspect to have access to medical data we ask you to let us verify this.
  • Do not share information on vulnerabilities until they have been resolved and erase any obtained data as soon as the problem is solved.
  • Do not attack (physical) security using social engineering, distributed denial of service, spam, brute force attacks, third-party applications for instance, or other types of attacks.

 

How we will handle your report:

  • Z-CERT will treat your report confidentially and will not share your personal data unless required by law.
  • Z-CERT will send you a confirmation of receipt and will respond within five working days with an evaluation of your report and an expected resolution date.
  • Z-CERT will keep you informed of the progress in resolving the problem.
  • In communication about the reported problem we will mention your name as the discoverer of the problem (unless you desire otherwise).
  • Z-CERT offers a thank you reward which can vary depending on the severity of the vulnerability and the quality of the report.

We strive to resolve any vulnerability as soon as possible. Once the problem has been resolved we will decide in consultation whether and how details will be published.

Not in scope:

Z-CERT will not process reports of vulnerabilities or security issues that can not be abused or are trivial. Below are a couple of examples of known vulnerabilities and issues that are outside the scope. This does not mean they are not important or should not be resolved, however our CVD process is meant for issues that can be actively abused. For example a vulnerabilities that can be abused by a public available exploit or a misconfiguration that can be used to bypass an existing security control. This list of exclusions is derived from a list used by the CERT of Surf.

  1. HTTP 404 codes/pages or other HTTP non-200 codes/pages and content spoofing/text injections in these pages
  2. Fingerprinting/version disclosures op public services
  3. Public files or directories that do not contain confidential information
  4. All disclosures of confidential/sensitive information will be judged by Z-CERT or the healthcare organization involved, and might be labeled “out of scope” if they do not pose a significant risk.
  5. Click jacking, problems that can only be exploited by clickjacking
  6. No secure/HTTP-only flags on unconfidential cookies
  7. OPTIONS HTTP method enabled
  8. Rate-limiting without clear impact
  9. All issues related to HTTP security headers, for example:
    1. X-Frame-Options
    2. X-XSS-Protection
    3. X-Content-Type-Options
    4. Content-Security-Policy
    5. Strict-Transport-Security
  10. SSL security configurattion issues, for example:
    1. SSL Forward secrecy disabled
  11. No TXT record for DMARC or a missing CAA-record
  12. Host header injection
  13. Reports of outdated versions of any software without a proof of concept of a working exploit
  14. Absence of security best practices or hardening measures. Though important, they are not within scope of a CVD process. Example:
    1. xmlrpc.php/wp-json of a wordpress website
    2. Absence of rate limiting measures.
  15. Vulnerabilities only affecting users of outdated or unpatched browsers and platforms
  16. Social engineering of healthcare organisation staff or contractors. For example creating phishing pages.
  17. Issues that result in Denial of Service (DoS) to organisations servers at the network or application layer.
  18. Issues that require unlikely user interaction
  19. Cross-site Request Forgery with minimal security impact
  20. Issues related to software or protocols not under the organizations control. For example known issues with ARP or HL7.
  21. It is possible that your report on an issue overlaps with a report on the same issue by another individual. In this case we will only accept the first report received by us.

Last update: july 2023