Mozilla’s 0-Day Investigative Network, Next Generation Bug Bounty Program

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping our world, from streamlining work tasks like coding to helping us plan summer vacations.

As we increasingly adopt GenAI services and tools, we face the emerging risks of their malicious use.

Security is crucial, as even one vulnerability can jeopardize users’ information. However, securing GenAI is too vast and complex for a single entity to handle alone.

Mozilla believes sharing this responsibility is essential to keep people safe successfully.

The Evolution of Bug Bounty Programs

To combat bugs and vulnerabilities, Netscape launched the bug bounty program in the mid–1990s to crowdsource bug discovery in the Netscape Navigator web browser.

This program incentivizes a community of independent participants to identify and report flaws.

Fast forward to 2002, and the next generation of bounty programs was born when iDefense rolled out the Vulnerability Contributor Program (VCP), the first security-specific all-vendor public bounty program.

Later, in 2005, TippingPoint introduced the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), which follows the same model.

It allows researchers worldwide to profit from their auditing research on nearly any technology vendor.

More recently, companies like HackerOne and BugCrowd have commoditized bounty programs, allowing participating companies to incentivize the community to report directly to them rather than through an intermediary like the VCP or ZDI.

Some GenAI companies are enrolled in these programs, which provide bounties for defects found in supporting software but not the models themselves.

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Others have hosted temporary model bounties while rapidly building their GenAI applications.

However, this approach benefits their models rather than the foundational technologies.

As companies move at light speed to be the first to market, can we trust that they’ll work with the same scrutiny on security and consider future implications? History has demonstrated that this usually is an afterthought.

0Din: The Next Generation Bug Bounty Program

As the technology landscape continues to evolve, we see the need for the next evolution in bug bounty programs to advance the GenAI ecosystem further and address the flaws within the models themselves.

These vulnerability classes include Prompt Injection, Training Data Poisoning, Denial of Service, and more.

Today, we are investing in the next generation of GenAI security with the 0Day Investigative Network (0Din) by Mozilla, a bug bounty program for large language models (LLMs), and other deep learning technologies.

0Din expands the scope to identify and fix GenAI security by delving beyond the application layer, focusing on emerging vulnerabilities and weaknesses in these new generations of models.

Mozilla’s Commitment to Security

At Mozilla, we believe openness and collective participation are essential in solving the emerging security challenges ahead of us for GenAI.

We have a long history of protecting users on the internet by building a secure and open-source browser, Firefox.

We also have one of the first and longest-standing bug bounty programs on the web, encouraging security researchers to report vulnerabilities publicly.

We know full well the power of working together as a community is one of the many ways to protect people.

It’s been a part of our mission, and we want to continue to advance this work.

As GenAI continues to integrate into various aspects of our lives, the importance of robust security measures cannot be overstated.

Mozilla’s 0Day Investigative Network represents a significant step forward in ensuring the safety and reliability of these advanced technologies.

We can build a more secure digital future for everyone through collective effort and community participation.

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