Google adds new $250,000 Cloud VRP reward for Root-in-Cloud bugs

What it is

Google Cloud's Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP) now pays $250,000 for "Root-in-Cloud" bugs. The page says the reward starts "this month" but gives no date. The announcement quotes Chris Betz, Google Cloud's CISO, and Michael Cote, Cloud VRP Lead.

Preconditions / Affected

The qualifying bar, in Betz's words, is full administrative control, "the equivalent of 'roles/owner' or complete IAM control". The target is arbitrary Google Cloud organizations or projects, with no prior access or special project setup.

Four things disqualify an exploit: dependence on prior access to the victim project, compromised credentials, social engineering, or user interaction.

What to do

Researchers can submit through two routes:

• Direct cloud-takeover report. Show the control described above.
• Infrastructure report. A valid report of remote code execution in Google's production infrastructure (Borg), or of root-in-prod, is automatically evaluated by the Cloud VRP panel for Root-in-Cloud eligibility. The researcher does not need to file separately.

Do not test against real customer projects. Google provides a deterministic proof-of-root mechanism built on a designated service account, and researchers cryptographically prove unauthorized access against that identity. The page says endpoint specifications, JSON payloads and CLI examples are on the Cloud VRP rules page, but it reproduces none of them.

Caveats

A researcher who reaches execution on Borg must stop there. Escalating, obtaining production credentials or moving laterally leads to disqualification.

The page does not say how the panel judges eligibility beyond the criteria above, and it does not describe the proof mechanism's technical details.

For context, the article notes that Google suspended submissions to its Open Source Software VRP in October after a flood of AI-generated reports. It also says Google paid a record $17.1 million to over 700 researchers in 2025, up 40% from $12 million in 2024, and more than $81.6 million since 2010.