The agency hopes that the system will help white-hat hackers to spot flaws in chip designs.

HackerOne beat its competitors to federal cloud services authorization, allowing it to deliver the kind of vulnerability disclosure platform sought for agencies governmentwide.

The Air Force wanted to see just how much "damage" or "malice" hackers could do from the inside.

DOD tapped cybersecurity firms Synack, HackerOne and Bugcrowd to provide vetted hackers for continual assessments of defense websites, hardware and physical systems.

The department recently joined the trend of federal bug bounty programs, which boost cybersecurity resources in ways that traditional methods probably can't.

"Assets could include closed networks, software-embedded devices, proprietary source code, or other private or internal systems not generally accessible via the public Internet," a new RFI says.

The industry — which basically hires and sells the services of freelance hackers who are paid to find weaknesses in systems or products — is seeing a…