Google announced on Monday the availability of Chrome 59, a version that brings several design and functionality improvements, and fixes for tens of vulnerabilities.
According to Google, a total of 30 flaws have been fixed in the latest version of the popular web browser, including many reported by external researchers. The experts who contributed to making Chrome more secure earned a total of more than $23,000.
The most serious of the vulnerabilities was reported to Google in mid-May by Zhao Qixun, aka S0rryMybad, of the Qihoo 360 Vulcan Team. The hacker discovered a high severity type confusion flaw in the V8 JavaScript engine (CVE-2017-5070) that earned him $7,500.
In April, Choongwoo Han and Rayyan Bijoora informed Chrome developers of high severity out-of-bounds read (CVE-2017-5071) and omnibox address spoofing (CVE-2017-5072) flaws that earned them each $3,000.
High severity use-after-free bugs were uncovered by Khalil Zhani and an anonymous researcher, but these earned them only $2,000 and $1,000, respectively. Emmanuel Gil Peyrot also received $2,000 for disclosing a medium severity information disclosure issue in CSP reporting.
The list of medium and low severity vulnerabilities patched with the release of Chrome 59 have been described as omnibox address spoofing, Skia buffer overflow, command injection in mailto handling, Blink user interface spoofing, extension verification bypass, and inappropriate JavaScript execution on WebUI pages.
Researchers also found a use-after-free vulnerability in the credit card autofill feature, and discovered that the credit card editor had been insufficiently hardened.
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 recently decided to offer more money for critical flaws.
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