Google paid nearly $3 million to security researchers in 2017 who reported valid vulnerabilities in its products.
The internet giant said that it paid out $1.1 million in rewards for vulnerabilities discovered in Google products, and roughly the same amount to the researchers who reported security bugs in Android. With the bug bounties awarded for Chrome flaws added to the mix, a total of $2.9 million was paid throughout the year.
In the seven years since Google’s Vulnerability Reward Program was launched, the search giant has paid almost $12 million in rewards.
Last year, 274 researchers received rewards for their vulnerability reports, and a total of 1,230 individual rewards were paid, Google says.
“Drilling-down a bit further, we awarded $125,000 to more than 50 security researchers from all around the world through our Vulnerability Research Grants Program, and $50,000 to the hard-working folks who improve the security of open-source software as part of our Patch Rewards Program,” Jan Keller, Google VRP Technical Pwning Master explains in a blog post.
The biggest single reward paid in 2017 was of $112,500. This bug bounty went to researcher Guang Gong, for an exploit chain on Pixel phones, revealed in August 2017. The researcher discovered that it was possible to abuse a remote code execution bug in the sandboxed Chrome render process and a sandbox escape through Android’s libgralloc.
Google also paid a $100,000 pwnium award to researcher “Gzob Qq,” who discovered it was possible to achieve remote code execution in Chrome OS guest mode by leveraging a chain of bugs across five components.
Another award worth mentioning went to Alex Birsan, who discovered access to internal Google Issue Tracker data was open to anyone. The researcher received $15,600 for his efforts.
Last year, Google also worked on advancing the Android and Play Security Reward programs and announced increased top reward for an Android exploit chain (a remote exploit chain – or exploit leading to TrustZone or Verified Boot compromise) to $200,000. The top-end reward for a remote kernel exploit was increased to $150,000.
Now, the company reveals that the range of rewards for remote code executions is being increased from $1,000 to $5,000. Moreover, a new category for vulnerabilities leading to private user data theft, issues where information is transferred unencrypted, and bugs leading to access to protected app components has been included. Researchers can earn $1,000 for such bugs.
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