Insecure Candidates: Chrome Wins Hacking Contest

The two-day PWN2OWN competition had but one goal: hacking an application as fast as possible to run code in it. The hacker contest is a feature of the annual CanSecWest conference, this year in Vancouver March 16-20, where standard PCs and Macs are subjected to vulnerabilities using the current version of the targeted software containing all the newest security updates. This year the hackers were to hack four fully patched browsers and five mobile devices. While the mobile devices remained "unscathed," almost all browsers failed the test in one way or another.

In less than 10 seconds Charlie Miller could open his MacBook with Safari and promptly won the $5,000 Zero Day Initiative prize. After jury members clicked a specially prepared link, Miller could control the system through an undocumented security hole.

Internet Explorer 8 was the next victim (ironically almost parallel to its official start in Las Vegas) to follow the MacBook pattern. A hacker named simply Nils used an undocumented vulnerability to control the Windows 7 subsystem and won another $5,00 prize from ZDI. He also exploited the first known security hole of IE8. Just earlier Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch in his talk had praised the high security standards of IE8 with its Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) protection technologies.

Twice again Nils pulled off victories. First was a Safari exploit that won him another $5,000. Secondly, the Firefox competition didn't escape his schadenfreude and he won another prize through a zero day exploit: altogether $15,000 for Nils.

Uncontested winner of the day was Google's Chrome browser, even though Charlie Miller did find a vulnerability that he later admitted his sandbox prevented him from carrying out. Details of the vulnerabilities unfortunately weren't given out: the TippingPoint DVLabs host of the conference pretty much buys the discretion of the hackers through its prize money, but will pass things on to the browser manufacturers.