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No One Can Hack Chrome OS at Pwnium 3

Michael Kwan — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:19:07 +0000

Google is constantly working to improve its security and one way that they go about doing this is by holding hacking competitions. They turn to the hacking and security community, seeing if they can hack their way through Chrome with a prize pot of over $3 million. And no one could do it.

The Pwnium 3 competition was hosted as part of the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver. Google offered up $3.14159 million (“Pi money”), but no one was able to emerge as the winning entry. The competition was with the newest version of Chrome OS running on a base Samsung Series 5 500 Chromebook. If they were able to achieve a browser or system level compromise delivered via a web page, they’d get $110,000. If they were able to get a compromise with device persistence, guest to guest with interim reboot, also delivered through a web page, the prize would be $150,000.

With that much money on the line, no one could do that. That’s got to be a pat on the back for Google. To be fair, they are currently “evaluating some work that may qualify as partial credit.” This is one of the smarter ways to go about things, because it helps to reveal potential vulnerabilities that Google can then address as quickly as possible.

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Russian Student Cracks Chrome, Claims Top Prize at Google Hackathon

Michael Kwan — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 23:31:51 +0000

Well, I guess Google Chrome isn’t impenetrable after all. A total of $1 million in prizes was recently offered by Google to anyone who could exploit the Chrome browser and, for the most part, people failed. That has now changed. At the Google Pwnium hackathon, a Russian university student has been able to hack his way through the cloud OS and earn himself the top prize.

Sergey Glazunov is now $60,000 richer for having successfully hacked a PC running the Chrome browser. What has prevented earlier attempts is that Chrome has something called a “sandbox” that is designed to stop hackers from accessing user data even if they compromise the browser. Glazunov found an exploit to get around that, bypassing the security and successfully hacking into the PC.

As part of the competition, all successful hackers must tell Google how they did it, effectively giving Google the opportunity to patch up the security flaw before real hackers take advantage of it in real life. Interestingly, a security firm also hacked Chrome at HP’s Pwn2Own event, doing so in just five minutes. Chrome is still pretty secure, but this does show that it’s not invincible.

[Source]

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