All major browsers fall during second day at Pwn2Own hacking contest
March 14, 2014 – 5:49 PMSecurity researchers demonstrated zero-day exploits against Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Adobe Flash Player during the second day of the Pwn2Own hacking competition Thursday, racking up total prizes of US$450,000.
A team from French vulnerability research firm Vupen hacked Google Chrome by exploiting a use-after-free vulnerability that affects both the WebKit and Blink rendering engines. The researchers then successfully bypassed Chrome’s sandbox protection to execute arbitrary code on the underlying system.
On Wednesday, the first day of the contest that takes place every year at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, researchers from the same team hacked Internet Explorer 11, Firefox, Flash Player and Adobe Reader.
Another anonymous researcher presented a Chrome remote code execution exploit Thursday, but the contest judges declared it only a partial win because some details of the hack were similar to those of an exploit presented earlier at Pwnium, Google’s own hacking contest that runs aside Pwn2Own.
Well known iPhone and PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz, known online as geohot, demonstrated a remote code execution exploit against Firefox, making it the competition’s fourth successful hack against Mozilla’s browser. Aside from Team Vupen, security researchers Jüri Aedla and Mariusz Mlynski had also compromised Firefox during the first day of the contest by exploiting different vulnerabilities.
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