Google has awarded a total of more than $25,000 to the researchers who reported the vulnerabilities patched with the release of a Chrome 109 update.
The company informed users on Tuesday that six security holes have been patched in Chrome, including four reported by external researchers.
Two of them are high-severity use-after-free issues affecting the WebTransport and WebRTC components. Researchers Chichoo Kim and Cassidy Kim have been credited for reporting the flaws and they have earned a total of $19,000 for their findings.
These vulnerabilities are tracked as CVE-2023-0471 and CVE-2023-0472.
Use-after-free bugs affecting Chrome can typically be exploited for remote code execution and sandbox escapes, but in many cases they need to be chained with other flaws.
The latest Chrome update also fixes a medium-severity type confusion issue that earned a researcher $7,500, and a medium-severity use-after-free for which the reward has yet to be determined.
None of these vulnerabilities appears to have been exploited in the wild. According to Google’s own data, eight Chrome flaws were exploited in attacks in 2022.
The tech giant admitted last year that an increasing number of Chrome vulnerabilities have been exploited by threat actors, and attempted to provide an explanation for this trend.
Related: Google Releases Emergency Chrome 107 Update to Patch Actively Exploited Zero-Day
Related: Google Patches Fifth Exploited Chrome Zero-Day of 2022
Related: Chrome Flaw Exploited by Israeli Spyware Firm Also Impacts Edge, Safari
SecurityWeek
