I'm always impressed by the simplicity of tricks like "Press F12 to try again", this is just so naughty :)
I'm always impressed by the simplicity of tricks like "Press F12 to try again", this is just so naughty :)
You think an attacker is right now thinking "Man, I know exactly how to make a lot of victims install an extension, but I can only steal their coinbase wallet and bank accounts, if only there was a way I could run calc.exe on their machine too..." who's going to pay more than $20k to upgrade from "steal all their money" to "steal all their money and run calc.exe"?
Vulnerabilities will always sell for more on the black market because there’s an added cost for asking people to do immoral and likely illegal things. Comparing the two is meaningless.
To give a straightforward answer: no, I don’t think $20k is underpaid. The severity of a bug isn't based on how it could theoretically affect people but on how it actually does. There's no evidence this is even in the wild, and based on the description, it seems complicated to exploit for attacks.
Super clever sleuthing
No, it's priced on demand and supply like anything else; bug bounties are priced to be the amount that Google thinks it takes to incentivise hunters to sell it to them, vs. to black hats.
So it's only working on Chromium, a way smaller attack surface than the whole Chrome users
I was under the impression that extensions were un-sandboxed and basically just executables I trust to run with the same privilege as the browser itself (which is a lot, at least under windows).
Not everything is priced on demand and supply -- at least not strictly.
Of course the potential of abuse is part of the equation, but I think Google (or similar large companies) simply has a guideline of how the amount of the bounty is decided, than surveying the market to see what its "actual value" is. It's not exactly a free market, at least not on Google's side.
(But yea, I think lots of people would sell exploits to criminals for enough money.)
From outside the browser they can exploit kernel bugs to elevate their privilege; and they can probe the network to attempt to move laterally in the org.
So while I think your comment is thoughtful, its thoughtfulness made me think of agreeing with the opposite :-)
Your principles will be gone by the time the 10th company starts to sue you for a public disclosure you did in good faith.
There's a reason why nobody wants to use their real name and creates new aliases for every single CVE and report.
Principles are discrepancies with the law, they don't exist. If the law dictates a different principle than your own one, guess what, you'll be the one that is in jail.
Whistleblower protection laws are a bad joke, and politicians have no (financial) incentives to change that.
You're on Windows? Download a binary, create some WMI triggers and get executed at every boot as the same user (requires no elevation for same user, if Admin, you can get NT_AUTHORITY). If you find something to elevate to Administrator you could also patch the beginning of some rarely used syscall and then invoke it and get a thread to yourself in the kernel. These things tend to almost chain themselves sometimes. At least on Windows it feels that way.
Also the user doesn't have to navigate to a specific URL in the final form, just needs to open devtools after installing the extension.
You should complete the sentence: “It’s priced based on demand and supply in legal markets like anything else.”
There are, of course, other markets where things like this are traded, but that’s a different story. That said, I think the author is free to negotiate further with Google if they believe it’s worth it.
Well deserved reward!
And in this case, it requires a chain of unlikely events. The user tricked into installing an extension (probably not one from the store, which is now particularly hard on windows). The user tricked into opening devtools.
It's gonna be sub-1%. Certainly still worth fixing, but nowhere near as bad as a universal XSS bug.
Although, maybe there is something to the immorality/illegality tax in this case. The author is in high school (how cool is that!?) and the article would probably hit differently to perspective employers if they were detailing the exploit they had sold to NK (which is to say nothing of how NK would feel about the sunlight).
You are essentially been paid to fill out forms and keep your mouth shut.
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GP wouldn't sell their discoveries to the criminals. But would they consider selling them to a third party as an intermediary, perhaps one that looks very much above board, and specializes in getting rewards from bug bounties in exchange for a percentage of payout?
I don't know if such companies exist, but I suspect they might - they exist for approximately everything else, it's a natural consequence of specialization and free markets.
Say GP would say yes; how much work would they put into vetting the third party doesn't double-dip selling the exploit on the black market? How can they be sure? Maybe there is a principled company out there, but we all know principled actors self-select out of the market over time.
Or, maybe GP wouldn't sell them unless starving, but what if agents of their government come and politely ask them to share, for the Good of their Country/People/Flag/Queen/Uniform/whatever?
Or, maybe GP wouldn't sell them unless starving, but what is their threshold of "starving"? For many, that wouldn't be literally starving, but some point on a spectrum between that and moderate quality-of-life drop. Like, idk, potentially losing their home, or (more US-specific I guess) random event leaving them with a stupidly high medical bill to pay, etc.
With all that in mind, the main question is: how do you know? How does Google know?
The reason people take an economic view of the world is because it's the only tool that lets you do useful analysis - but unlike with the proverbial hammer that makes everything look like a nail, at large enough scale, approximately everything behaves like a nail. Plus, most of the time, it only takes one.
GP may be principled, but there's likely[0] more than one person making the same discovery at the same time, and some of those people may not be as principled as GP. You can't rely on only ever dealing with principled people - like with a game of Russian roulette, if you pull the trigger enough times, you'll have a bad day.
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[0] - Arguably, always. Real breakthrough leaps almost never happen, discoveries are usually very incremental - when all the pieces are there, many people end up noticing it and working on the next increment in parallel. The first one to publish is usually the only one to get the credit, though.
But if you don't pay people enough in the first place... then they're just going to spend their time doing other things that actually do pay and your bugs won't get caught except by those who are specifically trying to target you for illicit purposes.
How? I always see this mentioned but it seem impractical to me. I've discovered bugs which have paid out a few thousand dollars - big corporates have well publicised schemes, but I've no idea how I would go about selling it to a criminal.
Even if I did know where to find them - how would I trust them? Can I tell they're not really the police doing a sting?
If they paid me, how would I explain my new wealth to the tax authorities?
Once the criminal knows they've paid me, what's to stop them blackmailing me? Or otherwise threatening me?
Oh, and I won't be able to publish a kudos-raising blog post about it.
How much would a criminal have to pay me to take on that level of risk?
Should Google pay out more for this? Probably. Is the average security researcher really going to take the risk of dealing with criminals in the hope that they pay a bit more? Unlikely.
Very impressive!
Huh... First result in google for "selling exploits" shows it's not only criminals who are buying exploits:
https://zerodium.com/program.html
(up to $500K for Chrome RCE, but probably not for this since requires extension install)
Another result is the Wikipedia article, which also talks about these gray markets:
"Gray markets buyers include clients from the private sector, governments and brokers who resell vulnerabilities."
He got nothing. No money at all. The CEO pretended to have forgotten every verbal agreement.
You only need to experience that kind of thing once to change your mind.
The more interesting question would be, if the bug bounty is enough to keep legitimate researchers engaged to investigate and document the threats. But..
The bug bounty itself is only a drop in the bucket for security companies, as it's a, unsteady and b, not enough to cover even trivial research environment cost.
Pratcially it's a nice monetary and reputation bonus (for having the name associated with the detection) in addition to the regular bussiness of providing baseline security intelligence, solutions and services to enterprises, which is what earns the regular paycheck.
Living from quests and bonties is more the realm of fantasy.
From a speech perspective, if I discovered an exploit and wrote a paper explaining it, what law prevents me from selling that research?
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1029 gives the definition and penalties for committing fraud and/or unauthorized access, and it includes the development of such tools.
A lot of it includes the phrasing "with intent to defraud" so it may depend on whether the court can show you knew your highest bidder was going to use it in this way.
(apologies for citing US-centric law, I figured it was most relevant to the current discussion but things may vary by jurisdiction, though probably not by much)
I once found a bug where I could access all of the names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers of all users for this new contest this company was running. I even found public announcements on Twitter. They told me this was a staging environment and wouldn't pay me. It clearly wasn't as the urls were linked directly to the announcement.
Another time, a company had an application that allowed other companies to run internal corporate training. I was able to get access to all accounts, information, and private rooms of all fortune 500 companies using it. They initially tried to get out of it by telling me they didn't own the application anymore (and immediately removed it from scope). I had proof it was in scope at the time I found the bugs (and even confirmed it before-hand with the platform).
Luckily, the platform I went through fought this and I got my payout...6 months later.
Even now, I have 50+ bugs that were triaged over the past year and the companies just sit on them and won't respond or pay out. Major platforms like Hackerone and Bug crowd don't seem to protect their researchers at all.
Is there some validation logic or something on this policy that the URL must be passed to the "alternative browser" somewhere in the AlternativeBrowserParameters?
Yes, obviously it is. Is it bad for others/the public? Probably, but not as bad as it is for Chrome.
> because it really is only Chrome here holding the power
I'm not sure this is true. Apple pretty much forces usage of their browser engine on iOS, and heavily try to get people to use Safari on macOS. Windows push Edge pretty hard on their OS, and their browser engine is pretty much intertwined to the OS so you can't not use it. Both of them say they let you change the default, but various links in the OS would still open Edge/Safari even if you have the default browser changed. Not sure if that's on purpose or not.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/15/f12-isnt-hacking-missouri-...
how so? on any new macOS install, I use Safari to download Firefox. After that, I never think about Safari until I'm trying to use its DevTools to look at iDevices. I never get a nag screen about Safari. I have never had default browser changed after any updates.
so where exactly is this heavy handed attempt at forcing Safari down anyone's throat?
>Considering that I'm using plain Chromium and not the branded Google Chrome, the channel will always be Channel::UNKNOWN. This also means that, unfortunately, the bug will not work on stable builds of Google Chrome since the release channel is set to the proper value there.
The author of this post had to bypass much more challenging obstacles. This is great work!
From the outside looking in, it seems that the community would applaud that behavoir, but I am not familier.