[nospice]

> An entry fee that is reimbursed if the bug turns out to matter would stop this, real quick.

The problem is that bug bounty slop works. A lot of companies with second-tier bug bounties outsource triage to contractors (there's an entire industry built around that). If a report looks plausible, the contractor files a bug. The engineers who receive the report are often not qualified to debate exploitability, so they just make the suggested fix and move on. The reporter gets credit or a token payout. Everyone is happy.

Unless you have a top-notch security team with a lot of time on their hands, pushing back is not in your interest. If you keep getting into fights with reporters, you'll eventually get it wrong and you're gonna get derided on HN and get headlines about how you don't take security seriously.

In this model, it doesn't matter if you require a deposit, because on average, bogus reports still pay off. You also create an interesting problem that a sketchy vendor can hold the reporter's money hostage if the reporter doesn't agree to unreasonable terms.

[notpushkin]

I don’t think it works for curl though. You would guess that sloperators would figure out that their reports aren’t going through with curl specifically (because, well, people are actually looking into them and can call bullshit), and move on.

For some reason they either didn’t notice (e.g. there’s just too many people trying to get in on it), or did notice, but decided they don’t care. Deposit should help here: companies probably will not do it, so when you see a project requires a deposit, you’ll probably stop and think about it.

[bombcar]

They operate at such a low overhead that it’s like expecting spammers to remove your email because you black hole them.

And likely even if they DO move on, there’s a thousand more right behind them having bought a “get rich quick” kit from someone.

[zrm]

Triage gets outsourced because the quality of reports is low.

If filing a bad report costs money, low quality reports go down. Meanwhile anyone still doing it is funding your top notch security team because then they can thoroughly investigate the report and if it turns out to be nothing then the reporter ends up paying them for their time.

[nospice]

My point is that on average, filing bad but plausibly-sounding reports makes the reporter money. Curl is the odd exception with naming-and-shaming, not the rule. Spamming H1 with AI-generated reports is lucrative. A modest deposit is unlikely to change that. A big deposit (thousands of dollars) would, but it would also discourage a lot of legitimate reports.