http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/05/anatomy-of-a-hack-6-separate-bugs-needed-to-bring-down-google-browser/ By Dan Goodin Ars Technica May 22 2012 An exploit that fetched a teenage hacker a $60,000 bounty targeted six different security bugs to break out of the security sandbox fortifying Google's Chrome browser. The extreme lengths taken in March by a hacker identified only as Pinkie Pie underscore the difficulty of piercing this safety perimeter. Google developers have erected their sandbox to separate Web content from sensitive operating-system functions, such as the ability to read and write files to a hard drive. Such sandboxes are designed to minimize the damage that can be done when attackers identify and exploit buffer overflows and other types of software bugs that inevitably find their way into complex bodies of code. Pinkie Pie's attack came during Pwnium, a contest that awarded $60,000 prizes to hackers who successfully broke out of the protective barrier by exploiting only vulnerabilities residing in code that is native to the Google browser. The teenager was one of only two contestants to win the top prize. He did it after executing a custom-written Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface directly on a Dell Inspiron laptop that ran a fully patched version of Chrome on a fully patched version of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system. Google patched the severest of the vulnerabilities within 24 hours of them being exploited. According to technical details Google published Tuesday, Pinkie Pie's odyssey began by exploiting a bug in a prerendering engine that helps Chrome work faster by gathering clues about webpages before they're loaded. By combining the attack with a second one that exploited a separate bug, he was able to inject a tiny, eight-byte address into a highly restricted section of the browser that processes commands sent to graphics cards. [...] _______________________________________________ LayerOne Security Conference May 26-27, Clarion Hotel, Anaheim, CA http://www.layerone.orgReceived on Wed May 23 2012 - 04:35:27 PDT
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