In Under 10 Hours, Google Patches Chrome To Plug Hole Found At Its Pwnium Event

An anonymous reader writes "Last night, Google held its Pwnium 2 competition at Hack in the Box 2012, offering up a total of $2 million for security holes found in Chrome. Only one was discovered; a young hacker who goes by the alias 'Pinkie Pie' netted the highest reward level: a $60,000 cash prize and a free Chromebook (the second time he pulled it off). Google today patched the flaw and announced a new version of Chrome for Windows, Mac, and Linux."

Comments

What about Java?

[roidzrus]

Oracle could take a lesson from this.

Re:What about Java?

[WD]

As soon as Oracle stops enabling a web browser plug-in with the Java installer, then your point may be valid. But as things currently are, they better damn care about vulnerabilities that affect applets! (which is the whole point of the OP)

Re:What about Java?

[Billly Gates]

Java is HUGE at the office and wont go away anytime soon. People still think of Netscape java 1.2 applets running in all gray glory from last century when think of Java. What they do not see is how Bank of America, Chase, ManPower, Seibel, Kronos, and many and I mean many corporate portals use it

It gets worse. They use Java to manipulate +Com objects through security exploits in the RMI. So a patched Java is not acceptable as it would close the hole HR needs to do the payroll so the app can talk to excel with full administrator privileges. Yes I did say admin which is why it cant' run on Windows 7 and requires XP and java 1.4.1. Not 1.4.0, not 1.4.2, just just 1.4.1 with its plus +30 security holes.

As a consultant or IT shop like Harry the best you can do is please to finance who say there is no compelling business case to be secure as they also use these IE 7 apps and are afraid of change too and like things fine just the way they are thank you very much!! ... aren't you a cost center anyway? ... thats what I thought we are a real business and have important things to go do go away etc.

Java 8 is almost out and I wonder what is going to happen? I only have java 6 on this desktop (plugins DISABLED!).

Pinkie Pie?

[Vylen]

So a My Little Pony hacked up Chrome?

I await the fan art for this visual image!

Re:Pinkie Pie?

[Anonymous Coward]

What can we say, that reputation for breaking the fourth wall includes sandboxes.

Sterling work here.

Re:Pinkie Pie?

[sandytaru]

The laws of physics don't apply to Pinkie Pie. Neither do the laws of programming.

I do wonder

[Trax3001BBS]

How hard Pinkie Pie had to fight not use their real name, or if Google just let it slide.

Second time is very good for him.

[epSos-de]

Who would have thought that legal hacking can make you rich faster than a day job. I bet he can live quite OK with the prize money, until the itch for luxury will create more need for money.

Crack on demand

[Xylantiel]

I think this demonstration of crack-on-demand is not really a good thing for chrome. This means that cracks for chrome are not worth too much more than 60k on the black market. That doesn't seem like a very high price.

Good to see

[dubbreak]

It's good to see Google is able to get patches out this quick. I've worked in small businesses that same day fixes were doable but a challenge and a government office with so much red tape pushing something to production that quick would have been impossible. I bet neither MS nor Apple could pull that off.

Looks like Google is keeping it's hacker culture alive rather than becoming a slow moving behemoth like their competitors.

Re:Good to see

[cbhacking]

MS certainly, and Apple probably, have the technical expertise to do so. Of course, there are usually other barriers. The problem isn't necessarily red tape, either... Chrome is a fairly young product, and has very little legacy code relying on its functionality. Even so, I question whether they did anything close to a full regression test on this patch. That's not to say that I expect the patch to have caused regressions; I just doubt that they can say, with full confidence, that it didn't. For something like IE, here there is a *huge* amount of third-party legacy code, some of it very crufty yet effectively unreplaceable, finding the root cause of the problem and writing the patch are trivial compared to the time that MS absolutely must spend on regression testing. There have been times in the past where a patch for a serious issue was made available quickly (within a day or so) as an opt-in hotfix, but typically they can't do a full "push to production" (i.e. make it an automatic update) in less than about a week.

The hacker/cowboy-coder culture often serves young products well, but it doesn't work once the product matures and develops a legacy. Assuming Chrome succeeds at making serious inroads in business, which is quite possible over the next few years (whether that's Google's current main goal for it or not), Google will have to slow down their "push to production" patch speed a little.

Non-existant QA?

[jmac880n]

While the turn-around time is impressive, it could not possibly have undergone extensive QA testing...

I understand that some bugs can have such OBVIOUS solutions - what could POSSIBLY go wrong with the fix???

Re:Non-existant QA?

[MtHuurne]

This is Google, they do a lot of automated testing and they're good at distributing workloads, so it's likely it did undergo extensive testing in a very short time. Also testing is all about managing risk: what are the chances of this fix introducing something that is worse than the issue itself? This pair of bugs allows an attacker to inject code and escape from the sandbox, which clearly falls into the Bad Things Category.

works if you have exhaustive unit tests

[Chirs]

If the fix changes a behaviour in a corner-case not caught by a unit test then your module regression test isn't worth much anymore.

Re:works if you have exhaustive unit tests

[GeekBoy]

Better to patch a vulnerability with the small possibility of having to issue another patched version to correct a corner case than to leave a vulnerability out there.

60K vs. median annual wage/income

[DragonWriter]

60K USD isn't exactly "make you rich" territory in the US, but it's a hell of a lot of money for a teenager. That's pretty close to the median annual salary.

If by "pretty close" you mean "well above".

For 2010 (the most recent year for which statistics are available; the 2011 statistics should be available this month), the Social Security Administration figures show the median annual wage in the US as $26,363.55, and the average annual wage as $39,959.30.

So, $60K is more than twice the median annual wage and more than 1.5 times the average annual wage. Its also a more than the median household income ($50,054 in 2011, per the U.S. Census Bureau).

Re:60K vs. median annual wage/income

[Billly Gates]

Those statistics really show a disturbing trend. The death of the middle class and the very rich who bring up that average so high. They are already buying houses in cash in an effort to raise rent prices and also use their wealth to collect rents on food and oil prices on those who do not have anything.

I can't see how anyone besides a single person living a very humble and low end lifestyle can survive at $26k a year! I would have to live with my parents if I earned that just to pay off my student loans. I would go hungry fast every car, insurance, rent, and student loans came in. Like maybe $10 a day max!

Getting people to work for you for free/cheap

[BeanThere]

Factoring all overheads (e.g. HR, office space, equipment), how much would a company like Google have to pay to hire a security team to do the amount of security testing work done collectively at this "competition"? Well above $2,000,000. A whole bunch of people do free testing, and one guy gets $60,000 'and a free Chromebook, wow' - not that impressive an amount, considering the amount of self-training and self-development you have to put it in to reach that level of expertise, and the amount of time needed to find a security problem. $60K is, what, maybe 6 months salary of hiring a person of that skill level to do similar work .. when you factor in overhead costs, maybe even just 3 or 4 months worth (Google would probably have been very lucky to hire someone to find that bug for that cost). Come on Google, you can afford to pay people properly for such valuable work .. I don't like these cheap tricks that companies like Google use to effectively get people to work for them for free or peanuts.