Final yr, we once more witnessed the ability of community-driven safety efforts as researchers from world wide contributed to assist us establish and deal with 1000’s of vulnerabilities in our services and products. Working with our devoted bug hunter group, we awarded $10 million to our 600+ researchers based mostly in 68 international locations.
New Assets and Enhancements
Similar to yearly, 2023 introduced a collection of adjustments and enhancements to our vulnerability reward applications:
- Via our new Bonus Awards program, we now periodically supply time-limited, further rewards for reviews to particular VRP targets.
- We expanded our exploit reward program to Chrome and Cloud by way of the launch of v8CTF, a CTF targeted on V8, the JavaScript engine that powers Chrome.
- We launched Cell VRP which focuses on first-party Android purposes.
- Our new Bughunters weblog shared methods during which we make the web, as a complete, safer, and what that journey entails. Check out our ever-growing repository of posts!
- To additional our engagement with prime safety researchers, we additionally hosted our yearly safety convention ESCAL8 in Tokyo. It included dwell hacking occasions and competitions, scholar coaching with our init.g workshops, and talks from researchers and Googlers. Keep tuned for particulars on ESCAL8 2024.
As in previous years, we’re sharing our 2023 Yr in Evaluation statistics throughout all of our applications. We want to give a particular thanks to all of our devoted researchers for his or her continued work with our applications – we sit up for extra collaboration sooner or later!
Android and Google Units
In 2023, the Android VRP achieved vital milestones, reflecting our dedication to securing the Android ecosystem. We awarded over $3.4 million in rewards to researchers who uncovered exceptional vulnerabilities inside Android and elevated our most reward quantity to $15,000 for crucial vulnerabilities. We additionally noticed a sharpened deal with larger severity points on account of our adjustments to incentivize report high quality and growing rewards for prime and significant severity points.
Increasing our program’s scope, Put on OS has been added to this system to additional incentivize analysis in new wearable know-how to make sure customers’ security.
Working intently with prime researchers on the ESCAL8 convention, we additionally hosted a dwell hacking occasion for Put on OS and Android Automotive OS which resulted in $70,000 rewarded to researchers for locating over 20 crucial vulnerabilities!
We might additionally prefer to highlight the hardwear.io safety conferences. Hardwear.io gave us a platform to interact with prime {hardware} safety researchers who uncovered over 50 vulnerabilities in Nest, Fitbit, and Wearables, and acquired a complete of $116,000 final yr!
The Google Play Safety Reward Program continued to foster safety analysis throughout well-liked Android apps on Google Play.
An enormous thanks to the researchers who made our program so successful. A particular shout out to Zinuo Han (@ele7enxxh) of OPPO Amber Safety Lab and Yu-Cheng Lin (林禹成) (@AndroBugs) to your arduous work and persevering with to be a few of the prime researchers contributing to Android VRPs!
Chrome
2023 was a yr of adjustments and experimentation for the Chrome VRP. In Chrome Milestone 116, MiraclePtr was launched throughout all Chrome platforms. This resulted in elevating the problem of discovery of absolutely exploitable non-renderer UAFs in Chrome and resulted in decrease reward quantities for MiraclePtr-protected UAFs, as extremely mitigated safety bugs. Whereas code and points protected by MiraclePtr are anticipated to be resilient to the exploitation of non-renderer UAFs, the Chrome VRP launched the MiraclePtr Bypass Reward to incentivize analysis towards discovering potential bypasses of this safety.
The Chrome VRP additionally launched the Full Chain Exploit Bonus, providing triple the usual full reward quantity for the primary Chrome full-chain exploit reported and double the usual full reward quantity for any follow-up reviews. Whereas each of those massive incentives have gone unclaimed, we’re leaving the door open in 2024 for any researchers seeking to tackle these challenges.
In 2023, Chrome VRP additionally launched elevated rewards for V8 bugs in older channels of Chrome, with an extra bonus for bugs current earlier than M105. This resulted in a couple of very impactful reviews of long-existing V8 bugs, together with one report of a V8 JIT optimization bug in Chrome since not less than M91, which resulted in a $30,000 reward for that researcher.
All of this resulted in $2.1M in rewards to safety researchers for 359 distinctive reviews of Chrome Browser safety bugs. We have been additionally in a position to meet a few of our prime researchers from earlier years who have been invited to take part in bugSWAT as a part of Google’s ESCAL8 occasion in Tokyo in October. We capped off the yr by publicly saying our 2023 Prime 20 Chrome VRP reporters who acquired a bonus reward for his or her contributions.
Thanks to the Chrome VRP safety researcher group to your contributions and efforts to assist us make Chrome safer for everybody!
Generative AI
Final yr, we additionally ran a bugSWAT live-hacking occasion concentrating on LLM merchandise. Other than enjoyable, solar, and so much to do, we additionally received 35 reviews, totaling greater than $87,000 – and found points like Johann, Joseph, and Kai’s “Hacking Google Bard – From Immediate Injection to Information Exfiltration” and Roni, Justin, and Joseph’s “We Hacked Google A.I. for $50,000”.
To assist AI-focused bughunters know what’s in scope and what’s not, we just lately printed our standards for bugs in AI merchandise. This standards goals to facilitate testing for conventional safety vulnerabilities in addition to dangers particular to AI methods, and is a technique that we’re implementing the voluntary AI commitments that Google made on the White Home in July.
Wanting Ahead
We stay dedicated to fostering collaboration, innovation, and transparency with the safety group. Our ongoing mission is to remain forward of rising threats, adapt to evolving applied sciences, and proceed to strengthen the safety posture of Google’s services and products. We sit up for persevering with to drive higher developments on the earth of cybersecurity.
An enormous thanks to our bug hunter group for serving to to make Google merchandise and platforms extra secure and safe for our customers world wide!
Thanks to Adam Bacchus, Dirk Göhmann, Eduardo Vela, Sarah Jacobus, Amy Ressler, Martin Straka, Jan Keller, Tony Mendez.
