Google Announced 'Pwnium 2' & Increased Prize Money $2m To Exploit Chrome

Few days ago we got the result of Microsoft hosted Blue Hat Security contest, where Microsoft awarded a bunch of hackers and gave away an amount of  $260,000. Immediately after this event, Internet giant Google   has upped the ante in its industry-leading cash-for-security-bugs program with hefty bonuses and a hacking contest that will award up to $2 million worth of prizes to people who successfully exploit its Chrome browser. In the official Chromium blog, Google has announced the plan for Pwnium 2. According to a blog post by Chris Evans, Software Engineer at Google- Pwnium 2 will be held on Oct 10th, 2012 at the Hack In The Box 10 year anniversary conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

This time, Google be sponsoring up to $2 million worth of rewards at the following reward levels:

• $60,000: “Full Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using only bugs in Chrome itself. 
• $50,000: “Partial Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using at least one bug in Chrome itself, plus other bugs. For example, a WebKit bug combined with a Windows kernel bug. 
• $40,000: “Non-Chrome exploit”: Flash / Windows / other. Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence that does not use bugs in Chrome. For example, bugs in one or more of Flash, Windows or a driver. 
• $Panel decision: “Incomplete exploit”: An exploit that is not reliable, or an incomplete exploit chain. For example, code execution inside the sandbox but no sandbox escape; or a working sandbox escape in isolation. For Pwnium 2, we want to reward people who get “part way” as we could definitely learn from this work. Our rewards panel will judge any such works as generously as we can. 

Exploits should be demonstrated against the latest stable version of Chrome. Chrome and the underlying operating system and drivers will be fully patched and running on an Acer Aspire V5-571-6869 laptop (which we’ll be giving away to the best entry.) Exploits should be served from a password-authenticated and HTTPS Google property, such as App Engine. The bugs used must be novel i.e. not known to us or fixed on trunk. Please document the exploit. 

We also like to give you reminder that earlier in this year Google had increased vulnerability bounties in Anniversary of Vulnerability Reward Programbe. Also PayPal, Facebook & many other has already started this paid bug bounty program.