Google Introduces $250,000 Root-in-Cloud Bug Bounty Reward

What it is

Google Cloud's Vulnerability Reward Program has a new top tier of $250,000, called root-in-cloud. It pays for a demonstrated path to roles/owner or complete IAM control over arbitrary Google Cloud organizations or projects. Google Cloud CISO Chris Betz and VRP lead Michael Cote described it, and the criteria are now on the Cloud VRP page.

Preconditions / Affected

The exploit path must not depend on any of these:

• existing access to a project
• previously compromised credentials
• user interaction or social engineering

Reports showing remote code execution in Borg, Google's production infrastructure, or root-in-production are also evaluated for this tier.

What to do

For researchers considering a submission, the page sets these rules:

• Prove access cryptographically against a designated service account, using Google's deterministic proof-of-root mechanism. Do not test against real customer projects.
• Stop all probing at the first execution in Borg. Escalation, extracting production credentials and lateral movement lead to disqualification.
• Expect Google to judge the entry point, execution context and attack surface. The award goes out if that analysis shows full arbitrary tenant or project takeover is possible.

Caveats

The page gives no payout conditions for partial impact, no tiers below this one, and no details of the proof-of-root mechanism or the designated service account. Betz and Cote say the targeted bugs, such as tenant-isolation bypasses and cross-service logic flaws, need deep architectural insight combined with agentic tooling. That is their view, not a measured result.