Posted by Guoli Ma, Sebastian Lekies & Claudio Criscione, Google Vulnerability Management Team

One year ago, we published the Tsunami security scanner with the goal of detecting high severity, actively exploited vulnerabilities with high confidence. In the last several months, the Tsunami scanner team has been working closely with our vulnerability rewards program, Bug Hunters, to further improve Tsunami's security detection capabilities.

Today, we are announcing a new experimental Patch Reward Program for the Tsunami project. Participants in the program will receive patch rewards for providing novel Tsunami detection plugins and web application fingerprints. We hope this program will allow us to quickly extend the detection capabilities of the scanner to better benefit our users and uncover more vulnerabilities in their network infrastructure.

For this launch, we will accept two types of contributions:

• Vulnerability detection plugins: In order to expand Tsunami scanner's detection capabilities, we encourage everyone who is interested in making contributions to this project to add new vulnerabilities detection plugins. All plugin contributions will be reviewed by our panel members in Google's Vulnerability Management team and the reward amount will be determined by the severity as well as the time sensitivity of the vulnerability.

• Web application fingerprints: Several months ago, we added new web application fingerprinting capabilities to Tsunami that detect popular off-the-shelf web applications. It achieves this goal by matching application fingerprints against a database of known web application fingerprints. More fingerprint data is needed for this approach to support more web applications. You will be rewarded with a flat amount for each application added to the database.

As with other Security Reward Programs, rewards can be donated to charity—and we'll double your donation if you choose to do so. We'll run this program in iterations so that everyone interested has the opportunity to participate.

To learn more about this program, please check out our official rules and guidelines. And if you have any questions or suggestions for the program, feel free to contact us at tsunami-patch-rewards@google.com.