The CVE associated with it (CVE-2026-85046) is already being exploited in the wild. If we put our thinking caps on, how much do you think this vulnerability is actually worth? How much do you think an organization like Google would spend on, for example, AI tokens or compute to detect this internally before it was found and exploited in the wild?
Ethical disclosure is a complicated topic, because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment. But at the same time, if someone submits a critical issue like this, it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth. Why should a researcher be effectively penalized for responsibly telling a vendor instead of selling the bug to a "research firm" or three-letter agency?
It's one thing if you're an open source project maintainer just trying to put something out to the community. The math is a lot different if you're Google.
If the vulnerability is already being exploited in the wild --- as in, it's a vector people already know about and are tracking --- it's possibly not worth much at all. Vulnerability valuations depend heavily on the lifespan of the vulnerability; payments on black market are tranched (explicitly or less explicitly, as with "maintenance payments") based on whether they're patched.
Further: a vulnerability is probably not worth that much either, even if it's a hypercapable vulnerability, because the grey market buys full enablement kits, not vulnerability information. People making 6 figures on vulnerabilities are selling fully enabled full chain exploit systems, not just intelligence about a sandbox escape.
While I agree 1000 is hilariously low for this, worth is hard to quantify. Do you pay what it could theoretically cost your company? the amount the top bidding bad actor would be willing to pay?
The discount Google is getting on bounties versus internal spend is easy to estimate:
# assumed to be $0.5mil USD or greater
A := What quantity of salaries-and-benefits and AI-dollars does Google spend on zero-day research?
# assumed to be greater than zero
B := How many full sandbox RCEs are they *hoping* to discover per year with that budget?
# $/RCE budgeted spend
C := A ÷ B
# $/bounty
D := $1000 USD
# % discount per bounty relative to in-house spend
E := (C - D) / C
While we lack the data to be sure, it is reasonable to estimate that they're getting a discount of 90% or better versus internal spend on this bounty payment, if one assumes that they do not have many sandbox RCEs left undiscovered. It's unclear whether that assumption holds, but with only a single researcher at an assumed $0.5mil/year (all-inclusive after pay, stock, and benefits) is enough to support the plausibility of that 90% figure, before accounting at market rates for their internal use of the house AIs.
So, the most likely case is that they're greedy and miserly, and hope we don't do the math. However I recognize that there are judgment calls to be made here. Either their internal spending finds hundreds of RCEs per year, or they're significantly discounting bounty payments versus their actual worth, or they're negligent in budgeting for RCE discovery at all, or they assign zero value to the security of the Chromium platform underpinning Edge, Electron, et al. All of these are bad in different ways; one hopes a competent tech reporter actually pursues this line of questioning with them!
> or they're negligent in budgeting for RCE discovery at all, or they assign zero value to the security of the Chromium platform underpinning Edge, Electron, et al
I generally agree, but a 3rd explanation is they figure that too generous a bounty will flood them with reports of minor issues making major ones harder to see (and costing time and money to verify that could be spent looking for security issues).
we really do not want to engineer a system in which using bugs to make money is considered economically legitimate activity. It is still crime. The main reason to report bugs and get the bounties for doing so is still because it makes the world safer and healthier. The money is there to make is to incentivize the work of finding and reporting them -- not to outbid the bad actors.
Companies sometimes reward their employees with important bug fixes. When I worked on a big dev team, we'd even decide what were the most important fixes and give people a special 5k bonus or something.
But they weren't security issues necessarily. I never thought about it, fixing a huge performance issue is big. A security fix that gets caught early makes no noise so you just don't know how important it would have been. We also once had a really terrible bug that lead to lots of customers getting effectively attacked.
"Crime" is very flexible term. One country's criminal is another country hero. Maybe the author would sell the vulnerability to an organization making exploits for government use.
"Safety" is also a relative thing, when the world is safer for one party, it is usually worse for another.
Well, someone did decide to tell google about this in exchange for a thousand dollars (albeit unclear how much the money was the motivator). Doesn't that mean the market did decide in google's favour?
Someone decided to tell Google about this in exchange for an unknown amount of money, chosen unilaterally by Google at a later date, at which point the market value of the vulnerability is $0.
Has anyone actually been convicted of abetting a crime by selling a vulnerability, by itself, not conspiring with the buyer to commit a crime using said vulnerability? Not as far as I can see. It would be absurd to jail someone for accurately describing a bug.
In the past I would have thought this would incentivize finding bugs that might never be found. However it is now clear that all bugs that can be found will be found. So this makes a ton of sense.
Maybe needs a Good-Guy-Buy-It-Now w/instant delivery at a fair price. (OK that’s kind of a threat—you’re running an auction and you have the price the corp has to pay to avoid the auction ending.)
$1k is so dumb and the fact we’re discussing auctions is proof (hello, Sundar, what you doing over there?).
Guess this will change after the next e.g. nationwide hospital ransomware by a hacker who publicly laments bounty rates, if the news cycle accommodates the story long enough.
Maybe some code is so important and heavily trafficked it becomes a public works project, and various legs can bid for pieces of the project, line how all infrastructure works.
There are plenty of people out there who find vulnerabilities and sell them to the highest bidder. Anyone is welcome to do it, including the researchers and hackers reporting them responsibly. There's no need to try and make a convoluted ethical justification. "I did this bad thing because you didn't pay me enough not to" doesn't work past the 6th grade.
Interesting question, and how much should a user pay Google to fix the vulnerability? I suppose the smallest unit of currency less than the amount of effort they'd have to put in to mitigate it. A fully market economy of bug fixing here is an interesting idea, certainly, but if I'm being honest I actually don't want to pay Google a thousand dollars to fix security issues. In the limit, what would happen is that I end up with the competitor browser Elgoog Emorhc which fixes security issues for free, and pays very little for them, which is the status quo.
In the world where security issues are paid for entirely at market rate, it would also be very important to not use browsers by poor groups because they would be unable to pay for security reports on the market and consequently the browsers would be less secure.
Interesting idea, for sure, but I don't think it lands in a place I want to go since I neither desire stochastic payments nor desire that all browsers should be from large corporations.
It sounds insultingly low, yeah. I'm trying to imagine why they would pay so little. The only two reasons I can think of are either (a) they were already aware of it and fixing it, and therefore the report didn't really change much, or (b) it requires an unusual configuration or otherwise rare opportunity to that makes it impractical to exploit most users. Really curious to see what the issue was whenever it gets made public.
> But at the same time, if someone submits a critical issue like this, it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth.
I'd point out that part of the reason the grey and black market pays so well is because it is that type of market. You have to pay people extra to look past their morals and a risk premium against potential reputational and legal consequences.
Someone could sell it on the black market, sell it to Google, or just move on with their life and not sell it.
I don't know what this is worth on the black market, maybe I'd be scammed by even trying to sell it. Maybe I don't want to be a bad person. These are all things that go into the prices
> How much do you think an organization like Google would spend on, for example, AI tokens or compute to detect this internally before it was found and exploited in the wild?
On average, probably not that much. What's the amortized cost of all testing, static analysis, and audit / code review, per "prevented potential bug"?
Imagine the consideration for the Trump admin, should we pay this guy a million bucks for this attack that gets us into the command system of Iran, or would that be unethical. Of course they don't consider that at this time.
> Ethical disclosure is a complicated topic, because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment.
Why not? Capitalism requires they maximize their value. These profitable companies lay bare at the altar, so they should understand the requirements of their god.
The problem is they are being flooded with both fake AND real disclosures. Imagine if they tried to pay out $250,000 or more per bug? Would the cost be worth it? Maybe, but shareholders may not be pleased... Unless they viewed it as insurance against it being more financially sound for the finder to sell the exploit on the gray or black market instead...
They should just multiply a base rate against the severity level. Say the base rate is ranged so low-severity stuff is $500-1K base but high-severity stuff is $10K base. That would net a researcher ~$88K for this specific bug (8.8 severity).
>researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment.
Hell no, the same level bugs at Google should be enthusiastically paid way more than from an undercapitalized startup, who actually needs the help more so. Should be orders of magnitude difference in relation to scale.
>it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth.
Honest fair-dealing should come into play at least but there are some players who have struck it so rich they can now take enough pride to pay an additional premium just because they can, and their good human nature almost compels them ethically to do way more than the minimum.
Just apparently not at Google.
If a company has achieved financial success to a degree that they are no longer worried about complete failure for the foreseeable future, then it's only a matter of generosity vs Scrooge-like behavior.
What's missing from their overall business acumen if they can't even afford to project an image of generosity yet?
If they're not actively making a serious effort to pay the maximum they can well afford for bugs that are truly serious, there is a technical term for that. Chickenshit.
The CVE associated with it (CVE-2026-85046) is already being exploited in the wild. If we put our thinking caps on, how much do you think this vulnerability is actually worth? How much do you think an organization like Google would spend on, for example, AI tokens or compute to detect this internally before it was found and exploited in the wild?
in the darkweb, due to crypto, a lot. there is where the $ is, whether it's stealing crypto directly or phishing developers.
Normalising running arbitrary code delivered over the internet (in the form of JavaScript and WASM), as a necessary condition for accessing most web pages may not have been one of the best decisions we have made.
I think the problem is that we've let JS engines become absurdly complex so there's no way to avoid them having really gross bugs.
That said, I think that the V8 team has done a fantastic job of securing their engine. Their heap sandbox feature is really inspiring! It's really wild that (as far as I can understand this issue) someone is able to bypass it.
(Posted from a memory safe browser - WebKit MiniBrowser compiled with Fil-C. Pretty sure this is safer than even V8 and the heap sandbox.)
Running code by itself isn't that bad, it's the fact that browser developers have decided for some reason that this code needs to be as performant as possible, so, JIT.
I don't get it! The way JS is typically used, it doesn't even benefit from JIT all that much. Making ajax requests, doing stuff with strings, and moving DOM elements around doesn't need every CPU clock cycle to be used as optimally as possible. It's exceedingly rare for websites to actually be doing something that needs raw performance. And SPAs will be slow no matter what.
This might oversell the agency that practicioners have.
Sandboxed zero-install delivery will outcompete anything with more frictionful installs.
It's probably not the right model for a pacemaker though.
Web/JS has been a double-edged sword for FOSS: sure, I can run a free OS, but if most of my "apps" happen to be JS that I can't practically control, then I have won a battle and lost a war.
I remember noticing this shift in nerd culture. In the early 2000s, it was common for people to say on places like Slashdot that they don't trust JavaScript and run their browser with it off. In the early 2010s, I noticed HN commenters thought this was insane, tinfoil hat type thinking.
I still run with u matrix though, and most third party requests can be limited, but I no longer have enough patience when a required page doesn't work - I'll just rely on ublock origin to work.
I say this as someone does NOT disable JS in my main browser (because like, I have a job), but also knows a fair bit about why Firefox inside Tails now restarts in some cases...
It's the classic thing. Across every gdmf metric, excluding with "true empathy", no one *gives a fuck* until it affects them, or someone within (1-3) degrees of separatation. And having broad empathy is generally a good way to get yourself labeled/astrocized: both about as obvious "compriate" and obvious "adversary".
In fairness, in the early 2000s they were probably right. Early browser security model was a bit of a mess. The fact that this article is even talked about is a sign of how much better things are.
It's so ubiquitous and unavoidable at this point.. I was at a conference lecture in 2020 where someone was suggesting disabling JavaScript and I thought the same thing— how absurd. The times have really changed...
> Type confusion in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 152.0.7977.82 allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code inside the sandbox via a crafted HTML page.
So it was fixed in 152.0.7977.82 (before .83), if I read that right.
"Google has confirmed that an exploit exists in the wild but has not disclosed information about the threat actors, targeted organizations, or attack campaigns while the update is still rolling out."
There's a risk that someone had been sitting on a sandbox escape that assumed having RCE inside the sandbox first, and so they'd been waiting for an RCE exactly like this one.
Those folks would not be disclosing their sandbox escape unless they were good guys.
If it's in the CISA known exploited vulnerabilities catalog, tell me if I'm wrong but I assume people don't go around exploiting million dollar 0-days in public just to fuck around safely in a chrome sandbox.
So maybe we're going to see another CVE for the sandbox escape soon?
Crypto mining would be one application. But also, combined with a sandbox escape would make it particularly devastating. Usually full control of a device takes at least two exploits given the layers of security present in OS and browser environments.
It's because User Interaction is Required. CVSS 10 would be the case where everyone can be exploited without interaction.
Interestingly the 8.8 is more alert-worthy than the 9.8 and 10 cvss, because there is a need to be alerted of the current security risk, whereas with a cvss 2 vuln, there is nothing to be done by users, only admins.
As somebody who prefers to browse with JS off whenever possible, there's something absurd about the balance everyone takes for granted between (A) your personal safety against a devastating hack by malicious code and (B) surveillance advertising.
"Sorry, but to enter this shop you need to take one of the used syringes from that pile some dude delivers every day and poke yourself with it."
This seems irrelevant as the issue talks about being exploitable with a crafted HTML page, no mention of JS. If true, you would be able to be hit without js enabled.
It mentions a type confusion in V8. Is it possible to trigger that without JS enabled?
The "all chromium versions" part of the title is also misleading, most browser CVEs do not distinguish between "untested lower bound" vs "affects all" (even though it seems like it'd be trivial to bisect).
What exactly does "RCE inside sandbox" describe that goes beyond "the webpage can supply arbitrary JavaScript and the JavaScript engine executes it", but is still isolated from the system?
Chrome runs webpages in individual sandbox processes with very low privileges, as a defense-in-depth strategy. It generally requires at least two exploits to actually affect a user--first, get RCE in a sandboxed process, then find a separate vulnerability that lets you escape the sandbox process entirely. For this bug to have actually been used in the wild, there was almost certainly a second bug as well.
It means it can execute native code inside the sandbox, as opposed to Javascript. While still sandboxed, this lets it access some parts of the attack surface that JS would not have been able to, some of which may have other exploits that allow escaping the rest of the way.
I think people would like to understand what the "sandbox" is here and what isolation does it provide, is it an unprivileged process? something chromium specific? a v8/JS thing? etc.
Among other things, JavaScript in the browser has no way to even express "kill PID 1234 on the user's machine" or "list the contents of `C:\Users\Documents` and upload all of the files" or "spawn cmd.exe on the user's machine". How would you even do these things if you could run any JavaScript in the browser? You can't.
However, chrome.exe itself does because it's a native application, as is the sandboxed JavaScript interpreter inside of chrome.exe.
(This is a very oversimplified explanation but I think this is the disconnect people are having)
> JavaScript in the browser has no way to even express ... "list the contents of `C:\Users\Documents` and upload all of the files"
this is besides the point, but javascript has the file system api.
anyways to your broad point, i dont think this is convincing. What's the difference between not having an api vs having an api that is disabled (e.g. the syscall exists but is filtered). Either way you are not taking the action. RCE in the sandbox is an important step in the bigger exploit chain, but not because you can express things in the traditional syscalls inside the sandbox.
Because Javascript theoretically can't just access files on disk. Control over the render would let you do that, if not for the process level sandbox, which constraints things like file access, system, calls, etc.
But the process is still more capable than the VM. The process can talk to other processes via IPC, for example.
That's why you don't go from "javascript -> computer is taken over", instead you go from "javascript -> renderer control -> computer is taken over".
because with proper code exec you can trigger other bugs to escalate beyond the sandbox, whereas with JS you'd have to find a bug to escape from JS to native
can't get a proper ios/Android RCE with just JS code exec
Memory isolation having one tab or account open on your bank and another on this page does not mean it could leak across the sandbox and steal bank account details but anything inside of your general page content can be lost
This doesn't affect the score though, the reason there's 1.2 points less than the max is because there is a Required User Interaction. The user needs to visit a specific html page.
Even with the sandbox protection layer, the rest of the parameters are maxed out.
I don't know why this is being downvoted. This is called malvertising and its one of the most significant vectors for exploiting a vulnerability like this. Its happened multiple times over the last two decades.
My read of Google's disclosure is that there is likely no known escape from the sandbox. I don't agree this would be reported this way just because "user action" like "using web browser" is required. Even if this individual CVE is correctly an 8.8 there would be a critical assessment of a known chain. The only reason there wouldn't be, would be if the other vulnerability is known to Google but has no patch yet.
I don’t disagree, two or more things can be true at once.
That said I still use Firefox for other reasons.
I simply don’t trust google, I don’t trust Mozilla either but I do trust them more than Google and you do kinda have to have a browser to function in the modern world.
Despite what people are saying here, chrome has a really excellent track record. Nobody is perfect. Switching just because chrome got exploited one time will likely result in you switching to something worse.
Firefox absolutely does not have a better security track record than Chromium browsers and on top of it you’re recommending an extension as a security measure oh my god man this comment needs to be flagged dead
Let's take a moment to talk about the monetary value of this vulnerability.
According to the Chrome release page (https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2026/09/stable-channel...), Google paid a researcher $1000 for ethically reporting this.
The CVE associated with it (CVE-2026-85046) is already being exploited in the wild. If we put our thinking caps on, how much do you think this vulnerability is actually worth? How much do you think an organization like Google would spend on, for example, AI tokens or compute to detect this internally before it was found and exploited in the wild?
Ethical disclosure is a complicated topic, because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment. But at the same time, if someone submits a critical issue like this, it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth. Why should a researcher be effectively penalized for responsibly telling a vendor instead of selling the bug to a "research firm" or three-letter agency?
It's one thing if you're an open source project maintainer just trying to put something out to the community. The math is a lot different if you're Google.
If the vulnerability is already being exploited in the wild --- as in, it's a vector people already know about and are tracking --- it's possibly not worth much at all. Vulnerability valuations depend heavily on the lifespan of the vulnerability; payments on black market are tranched (explicitly or less explicitly, as with "maintenance payments") based on whether they're patched.
Further: a vulnerability is probably not worth that much either, even if it's a hypercapable vulnerability, because the grey market buys full enablement kits, not vulnerability information. People making 6 figures on vulnerabilities are selling fully enabled full chain exploit systems, not just intelligence about a sandbox escape.
[delayed]
If you really explore the concept of worth, Google "engineers" are grossly overpaid, otherwise they would have found this themselves already.
How many PMs are making more than bug bounties to fetch coffee and bagels?
Their priorities are all out of order.
While I agree 1000 is hilariously low for this, worth is hard to quantify. Do you pay what it could theoretically cost your company? the amount the top bidding bad actor would be willing to pay?
The discount Google is getting on bounties versus internal spend is easy to estimate:
While we lack the data to be sure, it is reasonable to estimate that they're getting a discount of 90% or better versus internal spend on this bounty payment, if one assumes that they do not have many sandbox RCEs left undiscovered. It's unclear whether that assumption holds, but with only a single researcher at an assumed $0.5mil/year (all-inclusive after pay, stock, and benefits) is enough to support the plausibility of that 90% figure, before accounting at market rates for their internal use of the house AIs.So, the most likely case is that they're greedy and miserly, and hope we don't do the math. However I recognize that there are judgment calls to be made here. Either their internal spending finds hundreds of RCEs per year, or they're significantly discounting bounty payments versus their actual worth, or they're negligent in budgeting for RCE discovery at all, or they assign zero value to the security of the Chromium platform underpinning Edge, Electron, et al. All of these are bad in different ways; one hopes a competent tech reporter actually pursues this line of questioning with them!
> or they're negligent in budgeting for RCE discovery at all, or they assign zero value to the security of the Chromium platform underpinning Edge, Electron, et al
I generally agree, but a 3rd explanation is they figure that too generous a bounty will flood them with reports of minor issues making major ones harder to see (and costing time and money to verify that could be spent looking for security issues).
You let the market decide. Google could purchase the bugs on the same market blackhats do.
we really do not want to engineer a system in which using bugs to make money is considered economically legitimate activity. It is still crime. The main reason to report bugs and get the bounties for doing so is still because it makes the world safer and healthier. The money is there to make is to incentivize the work of finding and reporting them -- not to outbid the bad actors.
> The main reason to report bugs and get the bounties for doing so is still because it makes the world safer and healthier.
Yeah let's see how this plays out, paying people less than their time is worth for RCEs.
Companies sometimes reward their employees with important bug fixes. When I worked on a big dev team, we'd even decide what were the most important fixes and give people a special 5k bonus or something.
But they weren't security issues necessarily. I never thought about it, fixing a huge performance issue is big. A security fix that gets caught early makes no noise so you just don't know how important it would have been. We also once had a really terrible bug that lead to lots of customers getting effectively attacked.
[delayed]
> we really do not want to engineer a system in which using bugs to make money is considered economically legitimate activity. It is still crime.
"Making money from bugs" is not solely a black-market activity. There are plenty of grey and even white hat activities in this market.
"Crime" is very flexible term. One country's criminal is another country hero. Maybe the author would sell the vulnerability to an organization making exploits for government use.
"Safety" is also a relative thing, when the world is safer for one party, it is usually worse for another.
Finding bugs is hardly a crime, selling them even isn't.
Now exploiting them? Yes that's a crime.
Google directly competes with the grey market for vulnerabilities. They are competitive in a bunch of different directions:
* They pay for vulnerabilities without reliable exploits (more for vulnerabilities that are demonstrably reliable).
* They don't require you to actually build a reliable exploit chain.
* They pay up front, not in tranches.
* They work with essentially all comers, unlike the grey market, where you're generally subcontracting to sell your first few.
Well, someone did decide to tell google about this in exchange for a thousand dollars (albeit unclear how much the money was the motivator). Doesn't that mean the market did decide in google's favour?
Someone decided to tell Google about this in exchange for an unknown amount of money, chosen unilaterally by Google at a later date, at which point the market value of the vulnerability is $0.
There's no way money is the motivator.
Blackhat markets will always be able to pay better. Selling to Google though you aren't chancing jail time.
> Blackhat markets will always be able to pay better.
... than Google?
> Selling to Google though you aren't chancing jail time.
Why would you go to jail for selling a vulnerability? It's free speech.
"Aiding and Abetting" crime is also a crime. Free speech has nothing to do with it.
That is a limitation on free speech though
Has anyone actually been convicted of abetting a crime by selling a vulnerability, by itself, not conspiring with the buyer to commit a crime using said vulnerability? Not as far as I can see. It would be absurd to jail someone for accurately describing a bug.
Telling someone the steps to rob a bank world probably catch you some charges, I'm assuming.
No, it wouldn't.
They would be broke quick.
In the past I would have thought this would incentivize finding bugs that might never be found. However it is now clear that all bugs that can be found will be found. So this makes a ton of sense.
> In the past I would have thought this would incentivize finding bugs that might never be found.
Isn't that a good thing?
> However it is now clear that all bugs that can be found will be found. So this makes a ton of sense.
If Google can find all the bugs nowadays, presumably with AI, why still pay a bug bounty? At least by this logic, bug bounties make less sense now.
Sure they make sense — you need some incentive to drive the price to zero.
ideally, an auction and the vendor or a government can bid against malicious actors (which can also be a government). hard to set up though.
What kind of auction would you like to run?
Remember that you can sell the same vulnerability to multiple people: it's software you can copy.
Maybe needs a Good-Guy-Buy-It-Now w/instant delivery at a fair price. (OK that’s kind of a threat—you’re running an auction and you have the price the corp has to pay to avoid the auction ending.)
$1k is so dumb and the fact we’re discussing auctions is proof (hello, Sundar, what you doing over there?).
Guess this will change after the next e.g. nationwide hospital ransomware by a hacker who publicly laments bounty rates, if the news cycle accommodates the story long enough.
it seems unlikely google's lawyers would go for this
Maybe some code is so important and heavily trafficked it becomes a public works project, and various legs can bid for pieces of the project, line how all infrastructure works.
well that's why setting it up is hard, because you would want to do it in a way that what they want doesn't matter.
There are plenty of people out there who find vulnerabilities and sell them to the highest bidder. Anyone is welcome to do it, including the researchers and hackers reporting them responsibly. There's no need to try and make a convoluted ethical justification. "I did this bad thing because you didn't pay me enough not to" doesn't work past the 6th grade.
Interesting question, and how much should a user pay Google to fix the vulnerability? I suppose the smallest unit of currency less than the amount of effort they'd have to put in to mitigate it. A fully market economy of bug fixing here is an interesting idea, certainly, but if I'm being honest I actually don't want to pay Google a thousand dollars to fix security issues. In the limit, what would happen is that I end up with the competitor browser Elgoog Emorhc which fixes security issues for free, and pays very little for them, which is the status quo.
In the world where security issues are paid for entirely at market rate, it would also be very important to not use browsers by poor groups because they would be unable to pay for security reports on the market and consequently the browsers would be less secure.
Interesting idea, for sure, but I don't think it lands in a place I want to go since I neither desire stochastic payments nor desire that all browsers should be from large corporations.
If this would have included a full RCE chain with Sandbox escape Google would have paid significantly more.
Having just a Sandbox RCE is neat, I've got some on my laptop currently, but it's just a piece of the puzzle.
It sounds insultingly low, yeah. I'm trying to imagine why they would pay so little. The only two reasons I can think of are either (a) they were already aware of it and fixing it, and therefore the report didn't really change much, or (b) it requires an unusual configuration or otherwise rare opportunity to that makes it impractical to exploit most users. Really curious to see what the issue was whenever it gets made public.
(c) there are so many undiscovered vulnerabilities that it doesn't make sense for them to offer a decent payout
> But at the same time, if someone submits a critical issue like this, it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth.
I'd point out that part of the reason the grey and black market pays so well is because it is that type of market. You have to pay people extra to look past their morals and a risk premium against potential reputational and legal consequences.
That said, the gap is probably not just that.
It seems like by definition it is.
Someone could sell it on the black market, sell it to Google, or just move on with their life and not sell it.
I don't know what this is worth on the black market, maybe I'd be scammed by even trying to sell it. Maybe I don't want to be a bad person. These are all things that go into the prices
> How much do you think an organization like Google would spend on, for example, AI tokens or compute to detect this internally before it was found and exploited in the wild?
On average, probably not that much. What's the amortized cost of all testing, static analysis, and audit / code review, per "prevented potential bug"?
this is why again, researchers should just honestly sell these to vuln brokers instead of donating them to trillion dollar companies for nothing.
nothing will change until big tech can no longer rip off security researchers
"because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment" Maybe they should now, not like anyone else cares about ethics anyway.
Imagine the consideration for the Trump admin, should we pay this guy a million bucks for this attack that gets us into the command system of Iran, or would that be unethical. Of course they don't consider that at this time.
> Ethical disclosure is a complicated topic, because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment.
Why not? Capitalism requires they maximize their value. These profitable companies lay bare at the altar, so they should understand the requirements of their god.
The problem is they are being flooded with both fake AND real disclosures. Imagine if they tried to pay out $250,000 or more per bug? Would the cost be worth it? Maybe, but shareholders may not be pleased... Unless they viewed it as insurance against it being more financially sound for the finder to sell the exploit on the gray or black market instead...
Pre-flood, they didn’t pay more did they?
> viewed it as insurance
Of course. Beyond the ethics, the social obligation, sleeping well at night by compensating hardworking people fairly.
“We can’t pay more or we’d have to hire more human reviewers” should never be a massive company’s line of thinking.
They should just multiply a base rate against the severity level. Say the base rate is ranged so low-severity stuff is $500-1K base but high-severity stuff is $10K base. That would net a researcher ~$88K for this specific bug (8.8 severity).
That would create a perverse incentive to inflate the severity levels even more than they already are
CVE severity is a terrible way to do this. If you follow the cybersecurity space you should know why.
it's such a drop in the bucket, it wouldn't make any difference
Seems like it was worth $1000 to the researcher in question.
>researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment.
Hell no, the same level bugs at Google should be enthusiastically paid way more than from an undercapitalized startup, who actually needs the help more so. Should be orders of magnitude difference in relation to scale.
>it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth.
Honest fair-dealing should come into play at least but there are some players who have struck it so rich they can now take enough pride to pay an additional premium just because they can, and their good human nature almost compels them ethically to do way more than the minimum.
Just apparently not at Google.
If a company has achieved financial success to a degree that they are no longer worried about complete failure for the foreseeable future, then it's only a matter of generosity vs Scrooge-like behavior.
What's missing from their overall business acumen if they can't even afford to project an image of generosity yet?
If they're not actively making a serious effort to pay the maximum they can well afford for bugs that are truly serious, there is a technical term for that. Chickenshit.
The CVE associated with it (CVE-2026-85046) is already being exploited in the wild. If we put our thinking caps on, how much do you think this vulnerability is actually worth? How much do you think an organization like Google would spend on, for example, AI tokens or compute to detect this internally before it was found and exploited in the wild?
in the darkweb, due to crypto, a lot. there is where the $ is, whether it's stealing crypto directly or phishing developers.
Normalising running arbitrary code delivered over the internet (in the form of JavaScript and WASM), as a necessary condition for accessing most web pages may not have been one of the best decisions we have made.
I think the problem is that we've let JS engines become absurdly complex so there's no way to avoid them having really gross bugs.
That said, I think that the V8 team has done a fantastic job of securing their engine. Their heap sandbox feature is really inspiring! It's really wild that (as far as I can understand this issue) someone is able to bypass it.
(Posted from a memory safe browser - WebKit MiniBrowser compiled with Fil-C. Pretty sure this is safer than even V8 and the heap sandbox.)
Running code by itself isn't that bad, it's the fact that browser developers have decided for some reason that this code needs to be as performant as possible, so, JIT.
I don't get it! The way JS is typically used, it doesn't even benefit from JIT all that much. Making ajax requests, doing stuff with strings, and moving DOM elements around doesn't need every CPU clock cycle to be used as optimally as possible. It's exceedingly rare for websites to actually be doing something that needs raw performance. And SPAs will be slow no matter what.
Agree. Chrome should just disable JIT by default and boom many website owner will start to optimize their website.
> decision we have made
This might oversell the agency that practicioners have.
Sandboxed zero-install delivery will outcompete anything with more frictionful installs.
It's probably not the right model for a pacemaker though.
Web/JS has been a double-edged sword for FOSS: sure, I can run a free OS, but if most of my "apps" happen to be JS that I can't practically control, then I have won a battle and lost a war.
I remember noticing this shift in nerd culture. In the early 2000s, it was common for people to say on places like Slashdot that they don't trust JavaScript and run their browser with it off. In the early 2010s, I noticed HN commenters thought this was insane, tinfoil hat type thinking.
It became insane because nothing bloody worked without Javascript some time in the early 2010s.
Like cellphones, javascript became necessary if you want to use webmail, access your bank's website, or whatever.
I still run with u matrix though, and most third party requests can be limited, but I no longer have enough patience when a required page doesn't work - I'll just rely on ublock origin to work.
I say this as someone does NOT disable JS in my main browser (because like, I have a job), but also knows a fair bit about why Firefox inside Tails now restarts in some cases...
It's the classic thing. Across every gdmf metric, excluding with "true empathy", no one *gives a fuck* until it affects them, or someone within (1-3) degrees of separatation. And having broad empathy is generally a good way to get yourself labeled/astrocized: both about as obvious "compriate" and obvious "adversary".
In fairness, in the early 2000s they were probably right. Early browser security model was a bit of a mess. The fact that this article is even talked about is a sign of how much better things are.
It's so ubiquitous and unavoidable at this point.. I was at a conference lecture in 2020 where someone was suggesting disabling JavaScript and I thought the same thing— how absurd. The times have really changed...
I still do "random" browsing in FF with NoScript, that said, I'll acknowledge the frequency of updates of Chrome,etc and years of hardening.
It's not the Bonzi-buddy and driveby-installed IE toolbars wild west of the early 00s.
The browsers on the computers at work show that it is very much still the driveby tool-bar install days.
In the future we can ask that your JaveScript and Wasm comes with a proof of being benign.
Prior art: the evil bit
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3514
V8 as a runtime goes far deeper than just webpages.
Sounds wild.
(Posted from memory safe WebKit; i.e. WebKit compiled with filcc and all of WebKit's dependencies compiled with filcc.)
I’m so tired. I think I’m just going to get a job as a garbage man and cancel my internet.
There's been a Chrome CVE like every week ever since it came out.
Brave is beating GrapheneOS on update timeliness:
https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Vanadium/releases
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases
Only if you use Nightly wait maybe not.
Is graphene even affected? JIT is disabled in default configurations.
This issue is already fixed in Google Chrome (152.0.7977.83)
TFA says
> Type confusion in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 152.0.7977.82 allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code inside the sandbox via a crafted HTML page.
So it was fixed in 152.0.7977.82 (before .83), if I read that right.
The release version just now updated to 152.0.7977.83 which has the fix.
I upgraded Vivaldi, which is reporting 152.0.7977.112
Does anybody have a source for the "actively exploited" part of the HN title?
by nature of being in the "known exploited vulnerabilities catalog" (https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog...)
"CISA maintains the authoritative source of vulnerabilities that have been exploited in the wild."
This line, I think? >This CVE is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog
"Google has confirmed that an exploit exists in the wild but has not disclosed information about the threat actors, targeted organizations, or attack campaigns while the update is still rolling out."
Chromium, or just Chrome?
For what is this exploited in the wild when it doesn't include a sandbox escape?
Is this chained with n-days?
There's a risk that someone had been sitting on a sandbox escape that assumed having RCE inside the sandbox first, and so they'd been waiting for an RCE exactly like this one.
Those folks would not be disclosing their sandbox escape unless they were good guys.
(Posted with a memory safe WebKit, Fil-C FTW)
If it's in the CISA known exploited vulnerabilities catalog, tell me if I'm wrong but I assume people don't go around exploiting million dollar 0-days in public just to fuck around safely in a chrome sandbox.
So maybe we're going to see another CVE for the sandbox escape soon?
Crypto mining would be one application. But also, combined with a sandbox escape would make it particularly devastating. Usually full control of a device takes at least two exploits given the layers of security present in OS and browser environments.
NIST probably had this one filed and ready to announce years ago
like those news agencies have obituaries of famous old people pre-written
I know a regular old geezer who's written his own obituary. Publish this when I die.
I bet famous people have their people write one to distribute immediately.
Also, writing those for your family sucks, easier to do it when they are alive and can tell some key stories.
So basically, Edge, Brave and any other browser built on Chromium. Nice.
Monocultures are great!
Why is this 8.8?
It's because User Interaction is Required. CVSS 10 would be the case where everyone can be exploited without interaction.
Interestingly the 8.8 is more alert-worthy than the 9.8 and 10 cvss, because there is a need to be alerted of the current security risk, whereas with a cvss 2 vuln, there is nothing to be done by users, only admins.
As somebody who prefers to browse with JS off whenever possible, there's something absurd about the balance everyone takes for granted between (A) your personal safety against a devastating hack by malicious code and (B) surveillance advertising.
"Sorry, but to enter this shop you need to take one of the used syringes from that pile some dude delivers every day and poke yourself with it."
This seems irrelevant as the issue talks about being exploitable with a crafted HTML page, no mention of JS. If true, you would be able to be hit without js enabled.
It mentions a type confusion in V8. Is it possible to trigger that without JS enabled?
The "all chromium versions" part of the title is also misleading, most browser CVEs do not distinguish between "untested lower bound" vs "affects all" (even though it seems like it'd be trivial to bisect).
Only a score of 8.8?
RCE inside sandbox, so requires chaining with another 0day.
What exactly does "RCE inside sandbox" describe that goes beyond "the webpage can supply arbitrary JavaScript and the JavaScript engine executes it", but is still isolated from the system?
Chrome runs webpages in individual sandbox processes with very low privileges, as a defense-in-depth strategy. It generally requires at least two exploits to actually affect a user--first, get RCE in a sandboxed process, then find a separate vulnerability that lets you escape the sandbox process entirely. For this bug to have actually been used in the wild, there was almost certainly a second bug as well.
It means it can execute native code inside the sandbox, as opposed to Javascript. While still sandboxed, this lets it access some parts of the attack surface that JS would not have been able to, some of which may have other exploits that allow escaping the rest of the way.
It means it can execute arbitrary machine code in the sandbox.
I think people would like to understand what the "sandbox" is here and what isolation does it provide, is it an unprivileged process? something chromium specific? a v8/JS thing? etc.
Seems to use OS-specific kernel syscall filtering facilities.
Windows: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/d...
Linux: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/0e94f26e8/d...
V8 also has its own sandbox, which I believe exists in that sandbox. I assume that's the one this exploit has RCE in, but its unclear.
https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8.git/+/refs/heads/mai...
I would assume in this case that there's full renderer control, not just a bypass of the in-process isolation.
great link, thanks
Okay, and why is that more of a security risk than executing arbitrary JavaScript in the sandbox?
Among other things, JavaScript in the browser has no way to even express "kill PID 1234 on the user's machine" or "list the contents of `C:\Users\Documents` and upload all of the files" or "spawn cmd.exe on the user's machine". How would you even do these things if you could run any JavaScript in the browser? You can't.
However, chrome.exe itself does because it's a native application, as is the sandboxed JavaScript interpreter inside of chrome.exe.
(This is a very oversimplified explanation but I think this is the disconnect people are having)
> JavaScript in the browser has no way to even express ... "list the contents of `C:\Users\Documents` and upload all of the files"
this is besides the point, but javascript has the file system api.
anyways to your broad point, i dont think this is convincing. What's the difference between not having an api vs having an api that is disabled (e.g. the syscall exists but is filtered). Either way you are not taking the action. RCE in the sandbox is an important step in the bigger exploit chain, but not because you can express things in the traditional syscalls inside the sandbox.
Because Javascript theoretically can't just access files on disk. Control over the render would let you do that, if not for the process level sandbox, which constraints things like file access, system, calls, etc.
But the process is still more capable than the VM. The process can talk to other processes via IPC, for example.
That's why you don't go from "javascript -> computer is taken over", instead you go from "javascript -> renderer control -> computer is taken over".
because with proper code exec you can trigger other bugs to escalate beyond the sandbox, whereas with JS you'd have to find a bug to escape from JS to native
can't get a proper ios/Android RCE with just JS code exec
It can do some things that JS can’t do, such as invalid pointer writes. But you are correct that this doesn’t automatically imply system access.
> It means it can execute arbitrary machine code in the sandbox.
Well which is precisely why we have sandboxes.
To me "executing arbitrary code in the sandbox" is similar to "I don't give a flying fuck for it's what a sandbox is for".
More information is needed. As someone commented: this has to be paired with at least another exploit to make anything remotely useful.
A sandbox is a sandbox. We want to understand how "code running in a sandbox" is "actively exploited".
Memory isolation having one tab or account open on your bank and another on this page does not mean it could leak across the sandbox and steal bank account details but anything inside of your general page content can be lost
This doesn't affect the score though, the reason there's 1.2 points less than the max is because there is a Required User Interaction. The user needs to visit a specific html page.
Even with the sandbox protection layer, the rest of the parameters are maxed out.
what is online ad networks for $100, alex
I don't know why this is being downvoted. This is called malvertising and its one of the most significant vectors for exploiting a vulnerability like this. Its happened multiple times over the last two decades.
My read of Google's disclosure is that there is likely no known escape from the sandbox. I don't agree this would be reported this way just because "user action" like "using web browser" is required. Even if this individual CVE is correctly an 8.8 there would be a critical assessment of a known chain. The only reason there wouldn't be, would be if the other vulnerability is known to Google but has no patch yet.
Just one more reason to never use Chrome. Their removal of MV2 to prevent UBlock Origin from working is another.
Chrome product management is horrible. Chrome software engineering is some of the best ever done.
(And no, I don't use it except for testing).
I don’t disagree, two or more things can be true at once.
That said I still use Firefox for other reasons.
I simply don’t trust google, I don’t trust Mozilla either but I do trust them more than Google and you do kinda have to have a browser to function in the modern world.
Which browser has a better security track record?
Despite what people are saying here, chrome has a really excellent track record. Nobody is perfect. Switching just because chrome got exploited one time will likely result in you switching to something worse.
If you're paranoid, disable JIT.
Vanadium makes improvements on Chromium. https://grapheneos.org/features#vanadium
Most of those are just changing flags, not really unique development. Like "disable JIT" is a Chromium flag. "Zero-init everything" is a Clang flag.
Right, but it's value-add on a derivative, not its own standalone engine.
Firefox with uBlock Origin. It’s astonishing how many exploits uBO stops before they ever reach your browser engine. It’s the antivirus of the 2020s.
Firefox absolutely does not have a better security track record than Chromium browsers and on top of it you’re recommending an extension as a security measure oh my god man this comment needs to be flagged dead
edit: links
https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1unhtxu/initial...
https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
Brave would be a much better option if you want security and good adblocking.
I suggest Zen browser (fork of FF), it feels closer to chrome.
I hear about Zen. Random q:
It can’t trick Canva into letting you use the color picker, or otherwise enable it, can it - if someone happens to know?
(What a dumb feature to be locked to the Googlesphere.)
What does it mean "closer to chrome"?
In a good way?
This is like saying never use seatbelts because people still die in car accidents.
Chromium is still far superior on the security front than any other browser.
Of all the reasons to use non-Chromium browsers whenever possible(!), this isn’t really on the list.
Oh, right, because other browsers never have bugs.
If we needed any more.
chrome has more bugs, not necessarily because it's less secure, but its popularity makes it a bigger target, so more bugs are found
Doesn't everyone else immediately update everything on their computer before they start doing anything?
what planet are you living on