William Findlay (Carleton University) and AbdelRahman Abdou (Carleton University)

While security researchers are adept at discovering vulnerabilities and measuring their impact, disclosing vulnerabilities to affected stakeholders has traditionally been difficult. Beyond public notices such as CVEs, there have traditionally been few appropriate channels through which to directly communicate the nature and scope of a vulnerability to those directly impacted by it. Security.txt is a relatively new proposed standard that hopes to change this by defining a canonical file format and URI through which organizations can provide contact information for vulnerability disclosure. However, despite its favourable characteristics, limited studies have systematically analyzed how effective Security.txt might be for a widespread vulnerability notification campaign. In this paper, we present a large-scale study of Security.txt’s adoption over the top 1M popular domains according to the Tranco list. We measure specific features of Security.txt files such as contact information, preferred language, and RFC version compliance. We then analyze these results to better understand how suitable the current Security.txt standard is for facilitating a large-scale vulnerability notification campaign, and make recommendations for improving future version of the standard.

View More Papers

NC-Max: Breaking the Security-Performance Tradeoff in Nakamoto Consensus

Ren Zhang (Nervos), Dingwei Zhang (Nervos), Quake Wang (Nervos), Shichen Wu (School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shandong University), Jan Xie (Nervos), Bart Preneel (imec-COSIC, KU Leuven)

Read More

Browser-Based Deep Behavioral Detection of Web Cryptomining with CoinSpy

C. Kelton, A. Balasubramanian, R. Raghavendra, M. Srivatsa

Read More

Local and Central Differential Privacy for Robustness and Privacy...

Mohammad Naseri (University College London), Jamie Hayes (DeepMind), Emiliano De Cristofaro (University College London & Alan Turing Institute)

Read More

CROW: Code Diversification for WebAssembly

Javier Cabrera Arteaga, Orestis Floros, Benoit Baudry, Martin Monperrus (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Oscar Vera Perez (Univ Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA)

Read More