Introduction
The Commission of Fine Arts (hereinafter, the CFA) is an independent, executive level micro-agency, charged with giving expert advice to the President, Congress and the heads of departments and agencies of the Federal and District of Columbia governments on matters of design and aesthetics, as they affect the Federal interest and preserve the dignity of the nation's capital. The CFA is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information.
This CFA vulnerability disclosure policy (CFA VDP) is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey CFA preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.
This CFA VDP describes what systems and types of research are covered by it, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.
The CFA encourages you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems.
Authorization
If you make a good faith effort to comply with the CFA VDP 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; the Commission of Fine Arts will not recommend or pursue legal action related to this 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 persistent command line access, 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.
- Protect any sensitive data (such as personally identifiable information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party) you may encounter upon discovery of a vulnerability. In that case, you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else other than the CFA.
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
- Any testing that allows unauthorized access to our servers
Scope
- *cfa.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). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at webmaster@cfa.gov before starting your research. You may also copy the security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS.
Though we develop and maintain other internet-accessible systems or services, we ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.
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 CFA, 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.
We accept vulnerability reports at security@cfa.gov. Reports may be submitted anonymously. If you share contact information, we will acknowledge receipt of your report within 3 business days.
By submitting a vulnerability, you acknowledge that you have no expectation of payment and that you expressly waive any future pay claims against the U.S. Government related to your submission.
What we would like to see from you
In order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:
- Describe the location the vulnerability was discovered and the potential impact of exploitation.
- Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots are helpful).
- Be in English, if possible.
What you can expect from us
Whether submitted anonymously or not, the CFA will address the vulnerability directly and will work to expeditiously resolve it. When you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.
- Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge receipt to the reporter, if known.
- Within 7 business days of receipt, we will conduct an initial assessment and confirm the existence and validity of the vulnerability. We will share with the reporter, if known, steps we are taking during the remediation process, including issues or challenges that may affect resolution. We may request that the reporter evaluate remediation effectiveness.
- Within 90 days of receipt, the reporter, if known, will be notified of the resolution outcome.
Questions
Questions regarding this policy may be sent to security@cfa.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.
v.1.0 7/14/2021