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The Chrome VRP Panel has decided to award $250k for this report

issues.chromium.org

11–20 of 292 posts

Re: The Chrome VRP Panel has decided to award $250k for this report

#11
post #4

How does one start acquiring skills like these?

I get the feeling these kind of skills are very rare because they fall in the category "understanding and debugging other people code/mess", while most people prefer to build new things (and often struggle to debug their own work).

It takes a lot a passion and dedication to security and reverse engineering to get there.

Re: The Chrome VRP Panel has decided to award $250k for this report

#12
post #9

"Decent." was the first word that came into my mind. After a second, I realized that 250,000 USD ist basically 0.00022 % of Alphabet's (Google's?) annual net income [0]. A life changing amount of money for an individual, but nothing more than a small blip on Google's charts. Of course, I'm aware of "budgets" and "departments", and that one simply does not move funds between departments. And while my mind is on the ve…

How much Alphabet makes is almost irrelevant. The incentive here should be for security researchers. As long as there's enough incentive for security researchers to continue to report the bugs they find (which must be balanced against the potential payment a criminal could get if exploiting the bug, which is not directly correlated to the company's income either, at least not necessarily), the payment is appropriate.

To be fair, goog has to pay comparable to other 3rd party brokers, and not necessarily "potential payment by exploiting the bug". Finding an exploit and being able to deploy it for financial gains are two distinct problems, with separate skillsets, risks, etc.

Plus there are some other benefits of disclosing to goog. After you get into VRP you get access to grants & stuff and can basically ask to study a problem and get funded for that effort. Being able to blog about it, pad your experience, etc etc. All while not having to look over your shoulder for 3 letter agencies your whole life :)

Re: The Chrome VRP Panel has decided to award $250k for this report

#13
post #4

How does one start acquiring skills like these?

Spending a lot of time debugging code. Eventually, the pattern recognizer in your brain will pick out the bugs. The term for this is "code smell".

For example, when I'd review C code I'd look at the str???() function use. They are nearly always infested with bugs, usually either neglecting to add a terminator zero or neglecting to add sufficient storage for the terminating zero.

Re: The Chrome VRP Panel has decided to award $250k for this report

#14
He had a pretty reliable exploit on the most used browser, pretty sure it he could have gotten more tax free on the black market.

Now, with EDR widely deployed it's likely that the exploit usage ends up being caught sooner than later, but pretty sure some dictatorship intelligence agency would have found all those journalists deep compromise worthwhile...

Re: The Chrome VRP Panel has decided to award $250k for this report

#15

"Decent." was the first word that came into my mind. After a second, I realized that 250,000 USD ist basically 0.00022 % of Alphabet's (Google's?) annual net income [0]. A life changing amount of money for an individual, but nothing more than a small blip on Google's charts. Of course, I'm aware of "budgets" and "departments", and that one simply does not move funds between departments. And while my mind is on the ve…

What's your suggestion exactly? Making anyone who can find a bug a millionaire? That's ridiculous. 250k is already insanely high.

You make a bunch money too, should you pay $100 for that taco? It's nothing to you.

Re: The Chrome VRP Panel has decided to award $250k for this report

#17

"Decent." was the first word that came into my mind. After a second, I realized that 250,000 USD ist basically 0.00022 % of Alphabet's (Google's?) annual net income [0]. A life changing amount of money for an individual, but nothing more than a small blip on Google's charts. Of course, I'm aware of "budgets" and "departments", and that one simply does not move funds between departments. And while my mind is on the ve…

Indeed, one of the great tragedies of life is that this happens. Humans cannot survive without water, yet the median water bill is $80, which is about 1% of the median household's income. People make so much money but refuse to pay for something that literally sustains their life. Join me in requiring that every household at least 10x the amount they pay for this precious water. To employees of water companies: Thank you for your service.

Re: The Chrome VRP Panel has decided to award $250k for this report

#18
post #15

"Decent." was the first word that came into my mind. After a second, I realized that 250,000 USD ist basically 0.00022 % of Alphabet's (Google's?) annual net income [0]. A life changing amount of money for an individual, but nothing more than a small blip on Google's charts. Of course, I'm aware of "budgets" and "departments", and that one simply does not move funds between departments. And while my mind is on the ve…

What's your suggestion exactly? Making anyone who can find a bug a millionaire? That's ridiculous. 250k is already insanely high. You make a bunch money too, should you pay $100 for that taco? It's nothing to you.

Equal to the black market price.

Anything less is an incitement to allow exploits to be used in the wild.

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