diff --git a/Makefile.am b/Makefile.am
index 9bf75c9501..67963ed32f 100644
--- a/Makefile.am
+++ b/Makefile.am
@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@
 AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS = foreign 1.4
 ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I m4
 EXTRA_DIST = ChangeLog COPYING LICENSE suricata.yaml.in \
-             threshold.config \
+             threshold.config SECURITY.md \
              $(SURICATA_UPDATE_DIR) \
 	     lua \
 	     acsite.m4 \
diff --git a/SECURITY.md b/SECURITY.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..70d57aec09
--- /dev/null
+++ b/SECURITY.md
@@ -0,0 +1,75 @@
+# Security Policy
+
+Being a security tool itself, the security of Suricata itself is naturally of
+great importance. This document describes the policy around security issues as
+well as how to report them.
+
+If you believe you found a vulnerability, please report it to us as described
+in this document.
+
+
+## Severity Levels
+
+We will determine the severity of each issue, taking into account our
+experience dealing with past issues, versions affected, common defaults,
+our estimate of exploitation complexity, part of the code affected,
+and use cases. We use the following severity categories:
+
+* **CRITICAL** Severity. This affects Tier 1 features that are enabled by default
+where the issue disrupts availability of the service, leading to severe
+loss of visibility and/or availability. Remotely triggerable traffic
+based code execution, crashes, or evasions with a wide scope are considered to be
+in-scope for this severity. These issues will be kept private and will trigger a
+new release of all supported versions. We will attempt to address these as soon
+as possible.
+
+* **HIGH** Severity. This includes issues that are of a lower risk than critical,
+perhaps due to being disabled by default Tier 1 or affecting Tier 2 and
+Community features, or which are less likely to be exploitable. These issues
+will be kept private and will trigger a new release of all supported versions.
+We will attempt to keep the time these issues are private to a minimum; our
+aim would be no longer than a month where this is something under our control.
+
+* **MODERATE** Severity. This includes issues like crashes or evasion in Tier 2 and
+Community features that are not enabled by default. These will in general be
+kept private until the next release, and that release will be scheduled so
+that it can roll up several such flaws at one time.
+
+* **LOW** Severity. This includes issues such as those that only affect the
+Suricata command line utilities, or unlikely configurations. These will in
+general be fixed as soon as possible in latest development versions, and may be
+backported to older versions that are still getting updates. These will be
+part of the Changelog as a security ticket, but they may not trigger new
+releases.
+
+Note that we'll be refining the levels based on our experiences with applying them
+to actual issues.
+
+
+## Support Status of affected code
+
+4 levels are defined: Tier 1, Tier 2, Community and Unmaintained.
+
+These are documented in https://docs.suricata.io/en/latest/support-status.html
+
+
+## Reporting Issues
+
+For reporting security issues, please use `security@oisf.net`.
+
+If you report a security issue to us, please share as much detail about the issue
+as possible: pcaps, attack scripts, potential fixes, etc. If you share pcaps or
+other data, please clearly state if these can (eventually) enter our public CI/QA.
+
+We will assign a severity and will share our assessment with you.
+
+We will create a security ticket, which will be private until a few weeks after
+a public release addressing the issue.
+
+We will acknowledge you in the release notes and the release announcement. If you
+do not want this, please clearly state this.
+
+We will not request a CVE, but if you do please let us know the CVE ID.
+
+OISF does not participate in bug bounty programs, or offer any other rewards
+for reporting issues.