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All Four Major Browsers Take a Stomping at Pwn2Own Hacking Competition

posted by janrinok on Saturday March 21 2015, @11:02PM   
from the lynx-FTW dept.

AnonTechie writes:

The annual Pwn2Own hacking competition wrapped up its 2015 event in Vancouver with another banner year, paying $442,000 for 21 critical bugs in all four major browsers, as well as Windows, Adobe Flash, and Adobe Reader.

The crowning achievement came Thursday as contestant Jung Hoon Lee, aka lokihardt, demonstrated an exploit that felled both the stable and beta versions of Chrome, the Google-developed browser that's famously hard to compromise. His hack started with a buffer overflow race condition in Chrome. To allow that attack to break past anti-exploit mechanisms such as the sandbox and address space layout randomization, it also targeted an information leak and a race condition in two Windows kernel drivers, an impressive feat that allowed the exploit to achieve full System access.

[Related]: http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/HP-Security-Research-Blog/Pwn2Own-2015-Day-Two-results/ba-p/6722884#.VQwyVuF7S_Y

• Re:which 4 browsers? (Score: 3, Interesting) by jasassin on Sunday March 22 2015, @10:44PM

  by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Sunday March 22 2015, @10:44PM (#161282) Homepage Journal

  So Lynx is still secure?

  OpenBSD just removed Lynx from the base install. I tried finding out why, there were at least a few references to security being a reason but no specific exploits listed. Maybe someone here has some better kung fu and can find out why OpenBSD just removed Lynx from the base install?

  --
  jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0x663EB663D1E7F223

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+1
  Interesting=1, Total=1
  Extra 'Interesting' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		3