Two hackers have found a way to pass through Google’s Chrome security measures and bypass browser’s sandbox. Each of them received $60,000 prize as part of Pwnium hacker contest.
One of them, nicknamed Pinkie Pie, leveraged three separate zero-day vulnerabilities and managed to produce a system access exploit.
Pinkie Pie is not a famous hacker but representatives of Google described him as a “known and respected security researcher.” In the course of an interview after showing his exploit to the publicity Pinkie Pie said it took him about a week and a half to find the flaws and develop a reliable exploit for a patched Windows 7 64-bit system
“OFFICIAL: PwniePie, PinkiePie, WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE? $60k to PinkiePie and we're sad PwniePie didn't show, he'd have hit $60k too” – said Chris Evans, member of Chromium Security Team, on Twitter afterwards.
The other Pwnium winner, a Russian student Sergey Glazunov also managed to find and take advantage of Google Chrome vulnerabilities. Justin Schuh of the Chrome Security Team said Glazunov managed to bypass Chrom’s sandboxing security and execute "code with full permission of the logged-on user."
“The aim of our sponsorship is simple: we have a big learning opportunity when we receive full end-to-end exploits. Not only can we fix the bugs, but by studying the vulnerability and exploit techniques we can enhance our mitigations, automated testing, and sandboxing. This enables us to better protect our users” – said Google in its Pwnium announcement advisory.
Google has already issued security patches that fix vulnerabilities, used by the researchers. “We have a team standing by waiting for this. We have three different teams working on putting together the fix, building a patch and releasing it for our customers,” a company spokesman said .
Vulnerability descriptions are accessible here:
http://www.naked-security.com/nsa/207054.htm
http://www.naked-security.com/nsa/207055.htm
