news: [ million hacker challenge for Vercel Sandbox
By Steven Van ·
Agents need to run untrusted code, and the microVM has become the standard way to do it: a dedicated guest kernel per workload, isolated from the host…
Vercel is opening its Sandbox product, part of the Vercel platform, to a public bug bounty: up to $50,000 per report and a total pool of up to $1,000,000 for anyone who can break the isolation between tenants. The program runs on HackerOne from August 18 to September 1, 2026, or earlier if the pool runs out.
Vercel Sandbox runs untrusted code inside a Firecracker microVM with its own guest kernel on bare-metal EC2 hosts, with outbound network access controlled by a host-side firewall. The challenge covers two boundaries:
- Compute: escaping the microVM to the host, or reaching or crashing another tenant's sandbox
- Network: defeating the sandbox firewall to reach unauthorized destinations, exfiltrate data, or retrieve brokered credentials
Container namespace escapes that stay inside the Firecracker guest OS are out of scope, and reports need a live proof of concept rather than static analysis to qualify. Bounties range from $1,000 for low-severity findings up to $50,000 for a critical that lets one tenant read or modify another's data. Vercel says confirmed techniques will become permanent fixes to the sandbox, and it will publish a writeup of the findings and fixes after the program closes.
