Security Disclosure Policy

Matrix.org greatly appreciates investigative work into security vulnerabilities carried out by well-intentioned, ethical security researchers. We follow the practice of responsible disclosure in order to best protect Matrix’s user base from the impact of security issues. On our side, this means:

• We will respond to security incidents as a priority.
• We will work with you to establish a disclosure time frame for the reported vulnerability. During this time frame, we will either work on a fix or decide to accept the risk, after which we will disclose the vulnerability.
• We will always transparently let the community know about any incident that affects them.

In general, we will aim for a fix within 90 days of processing your report, but we may propose a longer time frame (usually 120 days) for especially complex vulnerabilities. In some cases, when a vulnerability is particularly disruptive and/or easy to exploit, we may delay publishing technical details for an additional period after the fix is publicly available (usually no longer than 30 days).

If you have found a security vulnerability in Matrix, we ask that you disclose it responsibly by emailing [email protected]. Optionally, if you want to encrypt your email, you can use our PGP key. Please do not discuss potential vulnerabilities in public without validating with us first.

On receipt, the security team will:

• Review the report, verify the vulnerability and respond with confirmation and/or further information requests; we typically reply within 24 hours.
• Once the reported security bug has been addressed we will notify the Researcher, who is then welcome to optionally disclose publicly.

The following is a list of known issues and/or things we do not consider to be an issue. Please do not send reports regarding the following:

• Issues relating to SPF or DMARC.
• Directory listing on matrix.org/jira, which is a public archive with links from our GitHub.

The Matrix.org Foundation does not ordinarily provide bug bounties, though organisations building on top of Matrix may do so in future. We maintain a Hall of Fame to recognise those who have responsibly disclosed security issues to us in the past.