EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) greatly appreciates investigative work into security vulnerabilities, which is carried out by well-intentioned, ethical security researchers.
We value those who take the time and effort to report security vulnerabilities wherever they may be found in our applications or infrastructure.
If you believe you have found a security vulnerability, please submit your report to us using the following email address: csirt@ebi.ac.uk or via openbugbounty.org.
In your report please include the following details:
Since EMBL-EBI is a non-profit organisation, making the world’s public biological data freely available to the scientific community, it is unfortunately not possible for us to reward you financially, but we commit to:
After submitting your vulnerability report, you will receive an acknowledgement reply usually within three working days of your report being received.
The team will triage the reported vulnerability, and respond as soon as possible to let you know whether further information is required, whether the vulnerability is in or out of scope, or is a duplicate report. If remediation work is necessary, it is assigned to the appropriate teams.
Priority for bug fixes or mitigations is assessed by looking at the impact severity and exploit complexity. Vulnerability reports might take some time to triage or address. You are welcome to enquire on the status of the process, but should avoid doing so more than once every ten working days. The reason is to allow our teams to focus on the reports as much as possible.
When the reported vulnerability is resolved, or remediation work is scheduled, we will notify you, and invite you to confirm that the solution covers the vulnerability adequately.
This policy is designed to be compatible with common vulnerability disclosure good practice. It does not give you permission to act in any manner that is inconsistent with the law, or which might cause EMBL-EBI, or its partner organisations, to be in breach of any legal obligations.
This policy was last updated on 13 April 2021.