San Francisco, Aug 9 (IANS): Apple is planning to supply special iPhones to security researchers to help them tackle malicious hackers before they trespass or damage systems and to discover flaws and vulnerabilities better.

Researchers with a security research track record of high-quality systems on any platform are eligible to apply and they could end up earning a maximum payout of $1,000,000.

The special devices would be made available to researchers through the company's invitation-only bug bounty programme, The Verge reported on Thursday.

The announcement was made by Ivan Krstic, Head of security engineering and architecture at Apple, during the annual Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas earlier this week.

Apple first launched this bug bounty programme three years ago at the Black Hat conference and is now extending its use to cover macOS, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and more.

At the same conference, software giant Microsoft also announced its Azure Security Lab, intended to give experts a sandbox-like safe environment to test its Cloud security services better. The company also doubled the top Azure bug bounty reward for researchers to $40,000.