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Escaping the Chrome Sandbox Through DevTools

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Re: Escaping the Chrome Sandbox Through DevTools

#31
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The severity of a bug isn't based on how it could theoretically affect people but on how it actually does 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.

I know not everyone shares my world-view, but I need to be literally starving to consider selling whatever I discover to a criminal. principles > wild market

I mean the alternative isn’t that you are selling it on the black market, it’s that you expose the issue in a blog post and the first time google knows is because one of their employees see the post here on hacker news.

You are essentially been paid to fill out forms and keep your mouth shut.

Re: Escaping the Chrome Sandbox Through DevTools

#32
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know not everyone shares my world-view, but I need to be literally starving to consider selling whatever I discover to a criminal. principles > wild market

I think many people have internalised a purely profit driven world view, and it is what they expect to be the main motivator or themselves and others.

TL;DR: a random stranger is most likely a nice and honest and principled human being. A sufficiently large population of random strangers behaves approximately like a population of amoral(ish), rational(ish) economic actors. If your process involves continuously drawing a stranger at random from a population, then you can't avoid taking the economic view, because you eventually will draw a crazy or malevolent or economically-rational stranger.

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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.

Re: Escaping the Chrome Sandbox Through DevTools

#33
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know not everyone shares my world-view, but I need to be literally starving to consider selling whatever I discover to a criminal. principles > wild market

But you probably wouldn't take the time to write up a nice report and send it to Google either if they didn't pay. Or even try to find the bug in the first place. (But yea, I think lots of people would sell exploits to criminals for enough money.)

Yeah I think this is the part that never gets mentioned. I'd like to think that most people wouldn't immediately go to selling on the black market, even if the pay is better it's just too risky if you get caught.

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.

Re: Escaping the Chrome Sandbox Through DevTools

#34
Oof. Too late in my night to dive into the guts of what's broken in WebUI validation, but good on this person for persisting and figuring it out. It's pretty standard to question and distrust toolchains in the things we deploy, but at the same time we put way too much trust in magically convenient dev tools from large companies like Google or MS. Mostly because we want to get on with writing and testing our own code, not worry about whatever the fuck is lurking in Chromium or VSCode.

Re: Escaping the Chrome Sandbox Through DevTools

#35
post #5
post #3

Given the severity, I can't help but feel that this is underpaid at the scale Google is at. Chrome is so ubiquitous and vulnerabilities like these could hit hard. Last thing they need to do is to send the signal that it's better to sell these on the black market.

If you can trick someone into installing a malicious extension with arbitrary permissions, you can already run arbitrary code on every webpage they visit, including their logged in bank, social media, etc. 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…

No, "calc.exe upgrade" is definitely worth more than $20k to criminals, as it's a huge qualitative jump in capabilities. A full-privileged browser extension can only mess with things you actively visit in your browser. But give it "calc.exe privileges", and it now can mess with anything that touches your computer, with or without your involvement. Private keys on your hard drive, photos on your phone that you plugged in via USB to transfer something, IoT devices on your LAN - all are fair game. And so many, many other things.

Re: Escaping the Chrome Sandbox Through DevTools

#36
post #3

Given the severity, I can't help but feel that this is underpaid at the scale Google is at. Chrome is so ubiquitous and vulnerabilities like these could hit hard. Last thing they need to do is to send the signal that it's better to sell these on the black market.

> sell these on the black market.

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.

Re: Escaping the Chrome Sandbox Through DevTools

#38
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know not everyone shares my world-view, but I need to be literally starving to consider selling whatever I discover to a criminal. principles > wild market

But you probably wouldn't take the time to write up a nice report and send it to Google either if they didn't pay. Or even try to find the bug in the first place. (But yea, I think lots of people would sell exploits to criminals for enough money.)

Not worth it. Because now you are in the underbelly.

Re: Escaping the Chrome Sandbox Through DevTools

#39
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate that every time a vulnerability is posted, someone has to argue about whether the bounty is high enough. It’s always followed by, "blah blah, they're pushing whitehats to sell it on the black market." 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 a…

> The severity of a bug isn't based on how it could theoretically affect people but on how it actually does 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.

This assumes efficient markets which doesn't exist when there is a monopoly on legitimate buyers. The value any one individual puts on a thing does not a market make.

Re: Escaping the Chrome Sandbox Through DevTools

#40
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The severity of a bug isn't based on how it could theoretically affect people but on how it actually does 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.

This assumes efficient markets which doesn't exist when there is a monopoly on legitimate buyers. The value any one individual puts on a thing does not a market make.

Is it really a amonopoly though if there are multiple companies offering bug bounties? If the whitehat feels he is underpaid he could just go look for bugs for another product.
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