Google announced on Thursday that the stable channel of its Chrome web browser has been updated to version 57 on Windows, Mac and Linux.
The latest version brings several new features, including the availability of CSS Grid Layout, and various functionality improvements. Chrome 57 also patches 36 vulnerabilities, more than half of which were reported by external researchers who earned a total of $38,000 for their work.
The most serious of the flaws, based on the bounty amount, is a memory corruption bug (CVE-2017-5030) in the V8 JavaScript engine. Brendon Tiszka received $7,500 for this find.
Researcher Looben Yang earned $5,000 for a use-after-free vulnerability (CVE-2017-5031) in the Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine (ANGLE).
Other high severity vulnerabilities, which earned experts between $500 and $3,000, have been described as an out-of-bounds write in PDFium, an integer overflow in libxslt, three use-after-free weaknesses in PDFium, incorrect security UI in Omnibox, and multiple out-of-bounds writes in ChunkDemuxer.
The medium severity flaws patched in Chrome 57 have been described as an address spoofing issue in Omnibox, bypass of the content security policy in Blink, incorrect handling of cookies in Cast, a heap overflow in Skia, a couple of use-after-free bugs in GuestView, and information disclosures in V8, XSS Auditor and Blink.
The list of researchers credited for finding the security holes patched with the release of Chrome 57 includes Ashfaq Ansari of Project Srishti, Holger Fuhrmannek, Ke Liu of Tencent, Enzo Aguado, Yongke Wang of Tencent, Choongwoo Han, jinmo123, Jordi Chancel, Nicolai Grødum, Mike Ruddy, Kushal Arvind Shah of Fortinet, Dhaval Kapil and Masato Kinugawa. Some of the individuals who reported vulnerabilities wanted to remain anonymous.
Google has paid out more than $9 million since the launch of its bug bounty program in 2010, including more than $3 million last year. As vulnerabilities become more difficult to find, the tech giant has decided to offer more money for critical issues. Last week, the company informed researchers that the reward for remote code execution vulnerabilities has increased to $31,337.
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