Why Security Research Programs Aren’t About Research

Author

jeffkimbrow/0x6A656666 
~/:$ rc-labs

Scope & Disclaimer

This document does not disclose NDA-protected, proprietary, or vendor-specific operational details. No firmware names, drivers, exploit paths, or implementation specifics are included.

This is not a disclosure, escalation, or shaming exercise.

This is a first-person analysis of my participation in a vendor security research program, written from my own experience and limited to process behavior and classification outcomes. All opinions expressed here are my own.

$ git push 0x6A656666/RC-Labs

Intake Timing Observations

Across submissions, a consistent timing pattern was observed based on report framing:

• Reports framed solely from an exploitative standpoint:
  (e.g., attacker control, end-state impact, or escalation focus) → remained open for an average of ~6+ hours before closure or transition.
• Reports that included any level of causal or theoretical reasoning
  (e.g., invariant collapse, boundary-layer behavior, or chain-level analysis), even when paired with empirical observations → were closed on average within ~1 hour of submission.

Time-to-closure correlated strongly with report framing, not with reproducibility, technical clarity, or documentation completeness.

 These observations are descriptive only and do not imply reviewer intent or individual decision-making.

Metrics

• Total cases opened: 6 (All involving causality analysis and chain-level behavior)
• Expected behavior: 1
• Closed / Not a security concern: 3
• Open: 1

 Closed as:  too theoretical: 1

Background

Over the last five months, I stepped into a new realm of cybersecurity research under the assumption that participation in a formal vendor research program would clarify how upstream risk signals are evaluated.

Instead, it exposed a fundamental mismatch between research-driven reporting and programmatic intake expectations.

This document does not repeat the full analysis published on thoughts.jeffkimbrow.com. That work already covers the structural issues in modern security pipelines. What follows is an extension of that analysis, grounded in direct participation and observed outcomes.

Core Observation

Good-faith researchers operating at the causality and chain-behavior layer are frequently framed as “too theoretical” when they deliberately stop short of exploitation.

This framing occurs even when empirical evidence demonstrates boundary-layer failure and repeatable invariant collapse.

In practice, this creates a contradiction:

• Programs claim to value early risk identification
• Intake systems require late-stage artifacts to classify risk

The result is not rejection, but misclassification.

Observable Evidence

Across multiple submissions:

• Reports included reproducible conditions and causal reasoning
• Chain-level behavior was demonstrated without weaponization
• Ethical stop points were explicitly documented

Yet classification outcomes consistently correlated with what was withheld, not with what was provided.

Beyond the rules, the focus is testability: validated inputs, explicit state transitions, and consistent automated play across board sizes. When reports did not escalate to:

• code execution,
• privilege escalation, or
• end-state impact confirmation.

They were framed as speculative or theoretical—even when the underlying failure mode was empirically observable.

Issue

Security research programs implicitly penalize researchers for not crossing ethical boundaries, while simultaneously requiring those boundaries to be crossed in order to classify a report as actionable.

In short:

Failure to escalate to exploitation is frowned upon. Providing provable causality without exploitation is dismissed as too theoretical.

This is not a failure of individual reviewers.

In other words: the project becomes explainable. Not because it’s small, but because it’s composed.

It is a design failure in intake models—one that optimizes for remediation logistics and liability handling at the expense of upstream risk reasoning.

Closing

If security research programs only recognize risk after harm is demonstrated, they are not research programs. They are damage-processing pipelines.

Early warning signals do not become more valuable after exploitation—they become more expensive.

Labeling causality-driven reports as too theoretical does not eliminate risk. It delays recognition until someone else crosses a line the original reporter intentionally avoided.