Vulnerability Disclosure Policy

Introduction

This vulnerability disclosure policy applies to any vulnerabilities you are considering reporting to Historic England. We recommend reading this vulnerability disclosure policy fully before you report a vulnerability and always acting in compliance with it.

We value those who take the time and effort to report security vulnerabilities according to this policy. However, we do not offer monetary rewards for vulnerability disclosures.

Reporting

If you believe you have found a security vulnerability, please submit your report to us.

In your report submission, please include details of:

  • The website, IP, or page where the vulnerability can be observed
  • A brief description of the type of vulnerability, for example, “XSS vulnerability”
  • Steps to reproduce. These should be a benign, non-destructive proof of concept. This helps to ensure that the report can be triaged quickly and accurately. It also reduces the likelihood of duplicate reports or malicious exploitation of some vulnerabilities, such as sub-domain takeovers.

What to expect

After you submit your report, we will respond within five working days and aim to triage it within 10 working days. We’ll also aim to keep you informed of our progress.

The priority for remediation 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 about the status, but should avoid doing so more than once every 14 days. This allows our teams to focus on the remediation.

We will notify you when the reported vulnerability is remediated, and you may be invited to confirm that the solution covers the vulnerability adequately.

Once your vulnerability has been resolved, we welcome requests to disclose your report. We’d like to unify guidance to affected users, so please do continue to coordinate public release with us.

Guidance

You must NOT:

  • Break any applicable law or regulations
  • Access unnecessary, excessive, or significant amounts of data
  • Modify data in any Historic England systems or services
  • Use high-intensity invasive or destructive scanning tools to find vulnerabilities
  • Attempt or report any form of denial of service, e.g., overwhelming a service with a high volume of requests
  • Disrupt Historic England services or systems
  • Submit reports detailing non-exploitable vulnerabilities, or reports indicating that the services do not fully align with “best practice”, for example, missing security headers
  • Submit reports detailing TLS configuration weaknesses, for example, “weak” cipher suite support or the presence of TLS1.0 support
  • Communicate any vulnerabilities or associated details using methods not described in this policy
  • Social engineer, ‘phish’ or physically attack Historic England staff or infrastructure.
  • Demand financial compensation to disclose any vulnerabilities


You must:

  • Always comply with data protection rules and must not violate the privacy of Historic England users, staff, contractors, services or systems. You must not, for example, share, redistribute, or fail to properly secure data retrieved from the systems or services.
  • Securely delete all data retrieved during your research as soon as it is no longer required or within one month of the vulnerability being resolved, whichever occurs first (or as otherwise required by data protection law).

Legalities

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 Historic England or partner organisations to be in breach of any legal obligations.

However, if legal action is initiated by a third party against you and you have complied with this policy, we can take steps to make it known that your actions were conducted in compliance with this policy.