Microsoft Looks to Squash Bugs in its Azure DevOps Product

Microsofts latest bug-hunting program is targeting the companys Azure DevOps platform, which looks to make software development more secure.

Microsoft has created a Bug Bounty program for its Azure DevOps product. Redmond will offer bounties of up to $20,000 for flaws that are eligible under its guidelines.
As part of the January 17 announcement
, Microsoft noted that the program would apply to Azure DevOps Services -- formerly Visual Studio Team Services -- online, as well as the latest publicly available versions of Azure DevOps Server and Team Foundation Server.
The program will pay rewards from $500 all the way up to $20,000 depending on the severity of the problem that is described.
At its heart, Azure DevOps is a cloud service which was launched in 2018, and designed to allow collaboration on code development. The DevOps tag highlights that it focuses on all the phases that are part of the development lifecycle.
DevOps has become a broad paintbrush of a term to describe a higher velocity of development activities, which has become the goal for many enterprises trying to respond to market forces in a dynamic manner. It consists of many serial cycles of development, deployment and automated testing that increases the pace of product releases.
With this program, Microsoft hopes to discover vulnerabilities that have a direct and verifiable impact on the security of its DevOps customers.
Security has always been a passion of mine, and I see this program as a natural complement to our existing security framework, Buck Hodges, Microsofts Director of Engineering for Azure DevOps,
noted in the announcement
. Well continue to employ careful code reviews and examine the security of our infrastructure. Well still run our security scanning and monitoring tools. And well keep assembling a red team on a regular basis to attack our own systems to identify weaknesses.
Hodges thinks that the rewards will help motivate researchers to find security vulnerabilities in the DevOps services and allow corrections to be made to them before theyre exploited by attackers. It also seems that Microsoft wants you to know that the new program wont be replacing their own security efforts.
The bug bounty program is looking for these kinds of vulnerabilities:
Cross site scripting (XXS)
Cross site request forgery (CSRF)
Cross-tenant data tampering or access
Insecure direct object references
Insecure deserialization
Injection vulnerabilities
Server-side code execution
Significant security misconfiguration (when not caused by user)
Using component with known vulnerabilities
Unauthorized cross-tenant data tampering or access
The company guidelines also state that vulnerabilities based on user configuration or action will not be considered as inbounds for program purposes. This includes:
Vulnerabilities based on user-generated content
Vulnerabilities requiring extensive or unlikely user actions
Security misconfiguration of a service by a user, such as the enabling of HTTP access on a storage account to allow for man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attacks
Missing HTTP Security Headers (such as X-FRAME-OPTIONS) or cookie security flags (such as httponly)
Vulnerabilities due to third parties are also considered as out-of-bounds for program purposes, along with other classes of vulnerabilities including:
Server-side information disclosure
Denial of service (DoS) attacks
Cookie replay vulnerabilities
Vulnerabilities used to enumerate or confirm the existence of users or tenants
This type of program is Microsofts signal that its security virtue is to be applauded, and it also extends the companys recent actions in implementing bug bounties for its other products, including Microsoft Account and Azure Active Directory.
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— Larry Loeb has written for many of the last centurys major dead tree computer magazines, having been, among other things, a consulting editor for BYTE magazine and senior editor for the launch of WebWeek.

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Microsoft Looks to Squash Bugs in its Azure DevOps Product