Thousands of organizations have already adopted the idea of inviting good-faith hacking to hack into their systems via vulnerability disclosure, bug bounty and next-gen pen test programs. Even so, the risk of prosecution under anti-hacking laws still casts a cloud over the hackers who are trying to help, and many programs haven't removed this risk by including Safe Harbor language within their program policies. It's not intentional -- the simple truth is that the market has progressed so rapidly that most have implemented crowdsourced security programs without realizing this issue, nor do they know how to how to fix it. Bilateral Safe Harbor language enables program owners to not only provide a strong incentive for good-faith hackers in terms of explicit legal protection, but also to outline exactly what constitutes "good-faith" hacking for their organization, and leave legal protections against malicious hackers intact.
This talk provides an overview of Safe Harbor in the context of good-faith hacking and introduces a current effort to create a standardized, open-source, easily readable legal boilerplate for disclosure program owners all around the world to use.