Hacking

Expert publicly released Chromium-based browsers exploit demonstrated at Pwn2Own 2021

An Indian security researcher has published a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for a vulnerability impacting Google Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers.

The Indian security researcher Rajvardhan Agarwal has publicly released a proof-of-concept exploit code for a recently discovered vulnerability that affects Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and other Chromium-based browsers (i.e. Opera, Brave).

The researchers uploaded the PoC code on GitHub and announced its availability via Twitter:

According to The Record, the PoC code released by the experts was the same exploited by the security duo composed of Bruno Keith (@bkth_) & Niklas Baumstark (@_niklasb) of Dataflow during the Pwn2Own 2021 hacking contest.

 The two experts earned $100,000 for demonstrating an exploit for Chrome and Microsoft Edge web browsers.

“The team used a Typer Mismatch bug to exploit the Chrome renderer and Microsoft Edge. Same exploit for both browsers. They earn $100,000 total and 10 Master of Pwn points.” states the post published on the official site of the competition.

The two experts provided details about their exploit to the Chrome security team so the bug could be addressed but did not publicly share them. Google addressed the flaw, but Agarwal made a reverse engineering of the patch developed by the tech giant. The Indian researchers analyzed the changes introduced to the component of the Chromium open-source browser project, the V8 JavaScript engine, and understood how the original exploit was working.

The bad news is that the patch has yet to be implemented into official releases of the major Chromium-based browsers, including Chrome and Edge, that remain vulnerable to the attack.

The partially good news is that the code released by Agarwal only allows an attacker to run malicious code on a user’s operating system but is not able to escape the Chrome sandbox, which means that it could not be used to compromise the underlying machine.

Anyway, we cannot exclude that threat actors could chain the zero-day with a sandbox escape exploit to weaponize Agarwal’s PoC code.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Chrome zero-day)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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