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

Demo #15: Remote Adversarial Attack on Automated Lane Centering

Yulong Cao (University of Michigan), Yanan Guo (University of Pittsburgh), Takami Sato (UC Irvine), Qi Alfred Chen (UC Irvine), Z. Morley Mao (University of Michigan) and Yueqiang Cheng (NIO)

Read More

Shaduf: Non-Cycle Payment Channel Rebalancing

Zhonghui Ge (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Yi Zhang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Yu Long (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Dawu Gu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)

Read More

Trust and Privacy Expectations during Perilous Times of Contact...

Habiba Farzand (University of Glasgow), Florian Mathis (University of Glasgow), Karola Marky (University of Glasgow), Mohamed Khamis (University of Glasgow)

Read More

SemperFi: Anti-spoofing GPS Receiver for UAVs

Harshad Sathaye (Northeastern University), Gerald LaMountain (Northeastern University), Pau Closas (Northeastern University), Aanjhan Ranganathan (Northeastern University)

Read More