Findings from the $1M Vercel Sandbox challenge

Vercel’s two-week $1 million HackerOne challenge for Vercel Sandbox received 1,285 reports, validated 57 findings, and paid $242,000 in bounties, while an independent Trail of Bits review identified 20 additional findings and judged the core Firecracker microVM virtualization boundary sound. The most serious report uncovered an upstream Linux kernel networking zero-day that could leak host memory, crash hosts, or potentially enable host code execution under demonstrated conditions; Vercel coordinated with the researcher, AWS, kernel maintainers, and other partners on mitigations and pending patches. No report demonstrated access to customer files, secrets, or application data. Other findings included a device-mapper issue that could expose recycled disk blocks and a snapshot restore trust-boundary flaw that allowed two accounts controlled by the same researcher to swap and access each other’s snapshots, although targeting an unrelated tenant required an undisclosed random storage identifier. Vercel said it addressed these issues by reducing trust in guest-provided data, centralizing network-policy enforcement, adding defenses for potential future virtualization flaws, and moving snapshot management into host-side, project-scoped services.

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