Vulnerability Reporting Policy

Introduction

Wave is committed to ensuring the security of our customers, employees, and third-party partners by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.

This policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.

We encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems.

Authorisation

If you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorised we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and Wave will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research unless you have breached any law(s) that Wave is unable to waive any legal action against. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorisation known to the third party. Please note Wave does not in any circumstances accept any liability in relation to any third-party legal action against you.

Guidelines

Under this policy, “research” means activities in which you:

• Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.
• Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.
• Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish persistent command line access, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.
• Provide us a reasonable amount of time to resolve the issue before you disclose it publicly.
• Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.

Once you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including personally identifiable information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, not disclose this data to anyone else and destroy all copies of the data.

Test Methods

The following test methods are not authorised:

• Network denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data.
• Physical testing (e.g. office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing.

Scope

This policy applies to the following systems and services:

• www.wave-utilities.co.uk
• *.wave-utilities.co.uk

Any service not expressly listed above, such as any connected services, are excluded from scope and are not authorised for testing. Additionally, vulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you are not sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at security@wave-utilities.co.uk before starting your research.

Though we develop and maintain other internet-accessible systems or services, we ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.

Reporting a Vulnerability

Information submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely Wave, we may share your report with the relevant impacted parties and/or developers, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.

We accept vulnerability reports using the form at the bottom of this page or via security@wave-utilities.co.uk. Reports may be submitted anonymously. If you share contact information, we will acknowledge receipt of your report within 5 business days.

We do not support PGP-encrypted emails. For particularly sensitive information, submit through our HTTPS web form. Note, this form does not track/log any details beyond the fields completed. The contact details fields are optional if you would prefer to remain anonymous.

By submitting a vulnerability, you acknowledge that you have no expectation of payment and that you expressly waive any future pay claims against the Wave Utilities related to your submission.

We ask that you do not publicly share the vulnerability for 6 months or until confirmation is received that we have resolved the vulnerability.

To help us triage and prioritise submissions, we recommend that your reports:

• Describe the location the vulnerability was discovered and the potential impact of exploitation.
• Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots are helpful).
• Be in English, if possible.

• When you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.
• Within 5 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received (if contact details were included).
• To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.
• We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.
• If requested, once we have resolved any valid vulnerabilities raised, we will give credit publicly for the identification of the vulnerability.

Questions

Questions regarding this policy may be sent to security@wave-utilities.co.uk. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.