NSS

Skip to content What this pays sorona.xyz pays 1.25× the program's reward, up to +$1,000 per finding, plus a complexity bonus of up to $1,000 for especially complex or well-chained bugs. Finding │ Program pays │ Through sorona.xyz Highest Impact: a sandbox escape, or bypassing a WebExtension install prompt ($18,000 baseline, $20,000 with a high-quality report) │ $20,000 │ $21,000 Higher Impact: universal XSS ($8,000 baseline, $10,000 with a high-quality report) │ $10,000 │ $11,000 High Impact: other sec-high work such as an address-bar spoof, GPU-process memory corruption, or parent-to-child information disclosure ($3,000 baseline, and examples typically land at $3,000) │ $5,000 │ $6,000 Moderate Impact, at the committee's discretion │ $2,500 │ $3,125 Memory corruption triggered by an out-of-memory condition (typical award) │ $1,500 │ $1,875 Denial of service that persists across restarts, or that requires a machine reboot (typical award) │ $1,000 │ $1,250 Submit a vulnerability CVE history 7 Last 12 months 85 Lifetime Memory safety 55 % Parsing/validation 25 % Auth bypass 12 % Info disclosure 5 % Latest advisories Loading the feed Overview NSS is the TLS, X.509 and cryptography stack behind Firefox and Thunderbird, and it travels far past Mozilla: it is the crypto library in Red Hat Enterprise Linux's NSS-linked stack, the historical TLS layer of Chrome on Linux and ChromeOS, and the engine under certutil, LDAP tooling and Java's Sun PKCS#11 bridge. The Mozilla CA root store maintained alongside it is the trust anchor list consumed by Firefox, by many Linux distributions and by several language runtimes, so a certificate-validation bug here propagates into places that never shipped a browser. The volume is low, 50 CVEs over its life, but the severity is not: CVE-2021-43527, the BigSig heap overflow, was a pre-authentication bug reachable by anything that verified a DER-encoded signature. Mozilla pays for it through the Client Security Bug Bounty on Bugzilla, and because NSS runs in Firefox's parent process the top $20,000 sandbox-escape row is genuinely in reach. sorona.xyz adds 1.25× on top of whatever Mozilla awards, up to $1,000 more, plus a complexity bonus of up to $1,000 for a well-chained finding. In scope Mozilla pays for security bugs in its own code in the Firefox versions it ships, Nightly mozilla-central included, and NSS is vendored into that tree at security/nss The TLS 1.2 and 1.3 handshake state machines, the record layer, extension handling, session resumption and early data, all driven by bytes from whichever peer is on the other end ASN.1 and DER decoding, X.509 parsing, and certificate path building and validation through mozilla::pkix Revocation handling: OCSP, OCSP stapling, CRLs and CRLite The freebl and softoken primitives: RSA, the elliptic curves, the hash functions, the AEAD modes and the random number generator PKCS#11 module loading, and the PKCS#7/CMS and PKCS#12 handling around signed and encrypted blobs The certificate and key databases, cert9.db and key4.db, and the Mozilla root store as NSS consumes it The shared utility layer: SECItem memory handling, the base64 and PEM decoders, and the arena allocators the rest of the library sits on Out of scope Weak-cipher and protocol-configuration complaints with no exploit path, which are policy arguments rather than vulnerabilities Bugs only reachable through non-Firefox consumers of NSS (Red Hat's stack, certutil, LDAP tooling, the Java PKCS#11 bridge) unless you can show the browser path Pure denial of service that merely crashes the browser End-of-life branches Bugs in code the reporter contributed themselves Reports from Mozilla employees, contractors, and anyone with a business relationship with Mozilla Mozilla's own websites and services, which route to the separate Web Bug Bounty on HackerOne Most-valued findings Memory corruption reachable during a TLS handshake or from certificate verification. NSS runs in Firefox's parent process, so attacker code there is a sandbox escape by Mozilla's own definition, and that is the $20,000 row. A certificate or chain validation bypass that makes a bad certificate verify, because it breaks the one guarantee everything downstream of the Mozilla root store depends on Pre-authentication parsing bugs in ASN.1 and DER decoding of attacker-supplied signatures, certificates and keys: the shape CVE-2021-43527 took Flaws in the freebl or softoken primitives with demonstrated key-material recovery, as opposed to a timing difference with no recovery shown Revocation handling that lets a revoked certificate pass as valid through OCSP or CRL processing Program rules Submit through sorona.xyz first. We validate, coordinate with the program's security team, and add the payout uplift on top of whatever it awards. The bug has to manifest through Firefox; NSS consumed standalone by Red Hat, certutil or the Java tooling is outside Mozilla's client scope unless you demonstrate the browser path It normally has to reach sec-high or sec-critical for a reliable payout Mozilla reserves a seven-day window for its own automated tooling, so a bug its fuzzers reach first is not eligible Two reports of the same bug within 48 hours of each other split the bounty Whether the committee grades a report Highest Impact or High Impact is the difference between $20,000 and $5,000, so make the parent-process consequence explicit File on Bugzilla through the client bounty form at bugzilla.mozilla.org/form.client.bounty Disclosure Coordinated with Mozilla through Bugzilla, where the bug stays in a security-restricted group until a fix ships and an MFSA advisory goes out with researcher credit. Mozilla's terms ask for a reasonable amount of time before any part of the issue reaches a third party; because NSS also ships in Linux distributions, expect the fix to be coordinated with downstreams before anything is public. Safe harbor Sorona will not pursue legal action against you for good-faith research submitted to us in line with this policy. We cannot speak for the upstream project, its vendor, or any third party, and we do not grant authorization on their behalf. You are responsible for understanding and following the laws that apply to you, wherever you are, and for staying within any scope the project has defined. Submit a vulnerability