About us

Vulnerability Disclosure Policy

Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation
April 21, 2025

Introduction
The Udall Foundation is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers 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 ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.

We encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems.

Authorization
If you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized. We will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and the Udall Foundation 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.

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

  • Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.
  • 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 command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.
  • Provide us a reasonable amount of time to resolve the issue before you disclose it publicly.
  • Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.

Once you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including personally identifiable information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.

Test methods
The following test methods 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

Security researchers may:
View or store MCC nonpublic data only to the extent necessary to document the presence of a potential vulnerability.

Security researchers must:

  1. cease testing and notify us immediately upon discovery of a vulnerability,
  2. cease testing and notify us immediately upon discovery of an exposure of nonpublic data, and,
  3. purge any stored MCC nonpublic data upon reporting a vulnerability.

Scope
This policy applies to all Udall-managed systems and services that are accessible from the Internet. This includes the registered domain names udall.gov and ecr.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).

Reporting a vulnerability
Information submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the Udall Foundation, 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.

Researchers may submit reports directly to https://bugcrowd.com/engagements/udall-vdp. The Vulnerability Report should be in the template provided. Vulnerability Reports that are not in the correct template or that do not provide sufficient information will be rejected for processing by the analysis team.

Please note that Vulnerability Reports may be submitted anonymously. If you share contact information (Reporter Contact), we will acknowledge receipt of your report within five (5) business days of the report's receipt.

We do not support PGP-encrypted emails. For particularly sensitive information, submit through the mail process or provide a note that some information is sensitive, and you will be contacted with details on sending the sensitive information.

By submitting a report, researchers warrant that the report and any attachments do not violate the intellectual property rights of any third party.

The Udall Foundation will provide no monetary award, intention to advertise or give public credit to Researchers for identification of vulnerabilities.

Disclosure
The Udall Foundation is committed to the timely correction of vulnerabilities. However, we recognize that public disclosure of a vulnerability in the absence of a readily available corrective action likely increases versus decreases risk. Accordingly, we require that you refrain from sharing information about discovered vulnerabilities for 90 calendar days after you have received our acknowledgement of receipt of your report, or until you receive notice that the Udall Foundation has remediated the vulnerability, whichever comes first. If you believe others should be informed of the vulnerability prior to our implementation of corrective actions, we require that you coordinate in advance with us.

We may share vulnerability reports with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), other U.S. Government agencies, and vendors. We will not share names or contact data of security researchers, unless given explicit permission, or required by law or regulation.

Questions
Questions regarding this policy may be sent to securityreporting@udall.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.

Document change history

Version Date Description
1.0 February 19, 2021 First issuance.
2.0 April 21, 2025 Second issuance.