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Tag: pwnium

  • Calling All Hackers: Google Wants You To Break Chrome OS At Pwnium 3

    Pwnium is the annual hacker competition where Google invites coders from around the world to find security holes in Google Chrome. That changes this year as Google wants hackers to break both of its Chromium projects.

    Google announced today that Chrome will be one of the browsers hackers can take on at the annual Pwn2Own Competition. This year’s competition is hosted by HP’s Zero Day Initiative alongside Google, the latter of which will be underwriting a portion of the winnings for all targets – including non-Chromium browsers. The event will last between March 6-8 in Vancouver, BC. You can register here.

    At the CanSecWest conference on March 7, Google will be hosting its own competition – the third annual Pwnium. Instead of hacking Chrome, however, Google will task hackers with breaking Chrome OS. The company will be offering rewards in the following categories with up to $3.14 million in prize money up for grabs:

  • $110,000: browser or system level compromise in guest mode or as a logged-in user, delivered via a web page.
  • $150,000: compromise with device persistence — guest to guest with interim reboot, delivered via a web page.

    • Hackers attempting these challenges will have to use a base Wi-Fi model of the Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook. You are allowed to use any installed software, including the kernel and drivers. You can also use a virtual machine if you do not have the required hardware.

    Last year’s big winner was a teenage hacker who went by the alias of Pinkie Pie. It’s unknown if he will be bringing his skills back to Pwnium 3 to take on the much more difficult task of cracking Chrome OS. Either way, it’s going to be interesting to see if anybody can crack Chrome OS.

  • Google Chrome Cracked By Six Bug Combo

    Google Chrome Cracked By Six Bug Combo

    By all accounts, Chrome is a pretty secure browser. If you want to crack it, you’re going to have to put in some serious time and effort. Good thing Chrome is more often cracked by those who wish to increase the browser’s security instead of hacking it for personal gain. A recent crack against Chrome was accomplished only after throwing six bugs at it.

    Matt Cutts knows a thing or two about Google and its products. He says it’s pretty crazy that a hacker would be able to break into Chrome through such a long and arduous process. You know the crack is impressive if even the folks at Google are in awe of the talent on display.

    Matt Cutts
    @mattcutts     Pretty crazy: someone chained six bugs to crack Chrome: http://t.co/K0moeIbd Now fixed. Shows that Chrome is pretty secure.
    40 minutes ago via Tweet Button · powered by @socialditto
     Reply  · Retweet  · Favorite

    Tired of waiting until season three so she can break more fourth walls, master hacker Pinkie Pie has taken to Chrome to show the world what she can do. In all reality, the hack was carried out by a teenage male going by the alias Pinkie Pie. He was able to crack the browser by using really obscure openings that nobody else would really think to look for.

    Here’s the short version of the hack. He first used Chrome’s prerendering feature to load a Native Client onto a Web page. From there, he used a low-level interface to a GPU command buffer to command an overwrite in the GPU process. Then he used a ROP chain to execute arbitrary code inside the GPU process. Doing that allowed him a small window of opportunity to pass the GPU process off as the renderer. By taking control of this renderer, he was able to gain access to a privileged renderer which allowed him to break out of the sandbox. Once out of the sandbox, he was able to use two more bugs to run his own plugin that had full user privileges.

    The long version goes into much more detail about the hack including the specific bugs that he used. If you have any interest in hacking and the importance of patching tiny insecurities, then you’ll want to check out the full blog post. For those who just read the above paragraph and didn’t know what was going on, just know that somebody essentially pulled a combo on Google Chrome that broke the system.

    Google has fixed all of the above bugs within short order and Chrome is secure once more. Regardless, it just goes to show you that browser security is no simple matter. There are always plenty of ways to circumvent and break browsers. It just takes a little patience and a lot of coding know how.

  • Google Chrome’s Pwnium Contest Makes The Web A Safer Place

    Google began a competition called Pwnium last week that tasked hackers to find exploits on its Chrome Web browser. We reported how one Russian student had won $60,000 for his hack.

    The Google Chrome security team posted on Google+Chrome+Blog%29″>Chrome blog that the total payout in the last week for Pwnium is now up to $120,000. They were paid out to two submissions, one of which came from Sergey Glazunov. Google was able to roll out updates to patch these security flaws within 24 hours of being exploited.

    Exploits are normally patched by a security team that has limited information in regards to how the hacker exploited their software. They are usually forced to guess how the exploit was implemented by the trail left behind by the hacker. The Pwnium contest is akin to a controlled environment where the Chrome team can see the exploit in its entirety and have time to study it before rolling out an update.

    The Chrome security team also detailed a third exploit that was discovered at a different event last week. The exploit in question used a vulnerability in the Flash Player plug-in that could affect all browsers. The exploit was detailed to Adobe and their team is working on a patch that will be implemented in the near future.

    Speaking of Flash Player, Google announced that they are working with Adobe to provide a version of Flash Player that will run natively inside the Chrome sandbox. The Chromebook already has this functionality.

    All of this just goes to show you that there are good hackers out there. Hackers are usually painted in a bad light due to the actions of rogue agents, but the majority of them are just making the Web a safer and better place.

  • Google Patches Chrome Flaw In 24 Hours

    Google Patches Chrome Flaw In 24 Hours

    Yesterday we brought you news that Google had paid out $60,000 to Russian university student Sergey Glazunov for finding a security flaw in their Chrome browser. Glazunov, a participant in Google’s Pwnium contest, used a sandbox bypass to hack the latest version of Chrome running on a fully up-to-date Windows 7 PC. Google had offered a $60,000 prize to the first participant to identify a “full Chrome exploit” in the contest. With Glazunov’s success, Google happily paid him the money.

    And then they fixed the exploit. Less than 24 hours after Glazunov identified the exploit Google had begun rolling out an updated version of Chrome that patched it. In a post on the Google Chrome release blog last night, Google offered their congratulations to Glazunov and said that the exploit – which involved “UXSS and bad history navigation” – had been fixed. They also said, however, that the full details of the security flaw would be witheld until the update had been installed by the majority of Chrome users.

    Google’s Chrome browser has consistently gotten very high marks for its security, and has consistently fared far better than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox at the Pwn2Own hacking contest at the annual CamSecWest conference. Google has made a habit of rewarding those who are able to find security flaws in the software.

    Of course, it goes without saying that if you’re a Chrome user, you should make sure you have the latest update as soon as possible. The latest version is 17.0.963.78.

  • Google Chrome Hack Earns Student $60,000 At Pwnium

    The Google Chrome Security Team made the offer to hackers the world over: come to CanSecWest security conference, have a crack at finding Chrome exploits, win $60,000 if you succeed. A part of the Chromium Security Rewards Program, the contest is Google’s open-invitation to hackers to help Google identify exploits in the Chrome browser, which is based on the open-source project Chromium.

    That challenge was met with vigor but one Russian university student successfully hacked into a fully patched computer running Windows 7 (64-bit) by using a Chrome sandbox bypass. Sergey Glazunov, a security researcher and long-time Chromium contributor, collected the hacker bounty by being the first entry to locate a “full Chrome exploit.” Justin Schuh, a Chrome security team member, spoke to ZDNet following Glazunov’s triumph, calling the hack “very impressive.” He said Glazunov “executed code with full permission of the logged on user.”

    “This is not a trivial thing to do,” Schuh added. “It’s very difficult and that’s why we’re paying $60,000.”

    Senior Vice President of Google Chrome and Apps, Sundar Pichai, confirmed the successful hack on his Google+ page. Now that the hack is known throughout the developer world, Pichai understandably said, “We’re working fast on a fix that we’ll push via auto-update.”

    Google’s always boasted that their browser, Chrome, is of top-notch security standards but this excellence makes it harder for Chrome developers to actually improve the platform. No known problems, nothing to really fix, right? The Chrome Security Team explains on their blog,

    While we’re proud of Chrome’s leading track record in past competitions, the fact is that not receiving exploits means that it’s harder to learn and improve. To maximize our chances of receiving exploits this year, we’ve upped the ante.

    While Glazunov is only the first to achieve the $60,000 prize, he by no means is meant to be the last. Google has said they will award prizes on $60,000, $40,000, and $20,000 levels based on various levels of exploits that hackers can successfully locate in Chrome. Google has said it will award up to a total of $1 million for all winning entries.