The CVE associated with it (CVE-2026-85046) is already being exploited in the wild. If we put our thinking caps on, how much do you think this vulnerability is actually worth? How much do you think an organization like Google would spend on, for example, AI tokens or compute to detect this internally before it was found and exploited in the wild?
Ethical disclosure is a complicated topic, because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment. But at the same time, if someone submits a critical issue like this, it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth. Why should a researcher be effectively penalized for responsibly telling a vendor instead of selling the bug to a "research firm" or three-letter agency?
It's one thing if you're an open source project maintainer just trying to put something out to the community. The math is a lot different if you're Google.
tptacek 12 hours ago [-]
If the vulnerability is already being exploited in the wild --- as in, it's a vector people already know about and are tracking --- it's possibly not worth much at all. Vulnerability valuations depend heavily on the lifespan of the vulnerability; payments on black market are tranched (explicitly or less explicitly, as with "maintenance payments") based on whether they're patched.
Further: a vulnerability is probably not worth that much either, even if it's a hypercapable vulnerability, because the grey market buys full enablement kits, not vulnerability information. People making 6 figures on vulnerabilities are selling fully enabled full chain exploit systems, not just intelligence about a sandbox escape.
rileymat2 7 hours ago [-]
I was under the impression that the three letter agencies and contractors bought vulnerabilities?
StrauXX 4 hours ago [-]
Sometimes, yes. But usually, as a security researcher, you usually sold to brokers. The brokers made the vulnerability into a reliable exploit. That is whst they then sold to agencies. For a markup of course. The industry was in a tough spot already the past years. Now AI is shaking it up even more.
monster_truck 1 hours ago [-]
They want the good shit, not this bargain bin fuckup
Gabrys1 5 hours ago [-]
Knowing the vulnerability, creating an exploit might be relatively easy now that we have AI to figure the boring stuff out.
fr2029 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
doubletwoyou 8 hours ago [-]
Mate, it’s a style thing that depends on which style guide you’re following
AP recommends spaces around them, whereas Chicago doesn’t
besides if we’re critiquing incorrect following of English orthography
—Sentences should be capitalized
—The word “don’t” requires an apostrophe
—End sentences with a period
—That’s incorrect usage of an em-dash at the end there — but what does it matter anyways ;)
itsTyrion 9 hours ago [-]
Books I've read would disagree. Are you the emdash police?
blfr 5 hours ago [-]
Aren't we all nowadays.
altmanaltman 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ukuina 9 hours ago [-]
> Spacing around an em dash varies. Most newspapers insert a space before and after the dash, and many popular magazines do the same, but most books and journals omit spacing, closing whatever comes before and after the em dash right up next to it.
altmanaltman 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
idiotsecant 8 hours ago [-]
Before the LLMs made the emdash the tool of the electronic oppressor I used it often enough and other people did too.
I hate that it's basically become the little hitler moustache of punctuation. There was at least one guy who was really enjoying his tiny little moustache until he couldn't anymore. That is the emdash for me.
Heythatsfunny 8 hours ago [-]
> the emdash has become the little hitler moustache of punctuation
Legendary.
Miss that shit too.
Ez way to shit on Windows users who had to double up endashes like they were impoverished.
I guess in your analogy the double endash is Stalin’s mustache and the Soviet Union in general - Gaudy, excessive, starving for more
0xbadcafebee 10 hours ago [-]
How much money is lost by consumers/businesses for every hour the vulnerability is exploited in the wild with no patch?
tantalor 10 hours ago [-]
The value of the report is dependent on the scarcity of the knowledge. If anybody can report it, the bid goes down.
onion2k 6 hours ago [-]
The value of future reports should also be a component though. By paying a low amount you discourage ethical bug bounty hackers from bothering to look for more exploits. If I think I'm only getting $1000 for a Chrome issue versus $100,000 for an Acme Co issue, I'll be spending my time looking for Acme Co issues.
Bug bounties are as much a way of attracting talent to even try to exploit your system as they are about the exploits themselves. If you lowball the bounties the talent goes elsewhere.
tclancy 5 hours ago [-]
How do you figure? The value of the report is, ethics aside, the same as the value of exploiting it. Doesn’t matter if I can conceive of it, it matters if I can exploit it.
cannonpalms 24 minutes ago [-]
Supply and demand has to be considered. The more parties aware of the vulnerability, the more attractive sellers (reporters) have to make their ask to the buyer (defender).
toomuchtodo 8 hours ago [-]
There is a theta decay component. The zero day is highly valuable until known; once known, its value rapidly declines to zero.
randyrand 10 hours ago [-]
That’s not how things are valued. That’s moreso how the absence of something is valued.
wat10000 8 hours ago [-]
Go without air for a few minutes and you’ll die, and yet they give the stuff away for free.
luipugs 6 hours ago [-]
Stop giving them ideas.
nixon_why69 10 hours ago [-]
That's really informative but maybe a little overly capitalist-brained.
We shouldn't look to the black market as cost discovery for these vulnerabilities, most non-criminal researchers are not putting up an ask order and letting the black market compete with Google.
JoshTriplett 9 hours ago [-]
> We shouldn't look to the black market as cost discovery for these vulnerabilities
We absolutely should. One of the points of bug bounties is to discourage people from selling to the black market.
nixon_why69 8 hours ago [-]
That's one of the points, yes, but the black market doesn't dictate the value of the exploit to Google.
A hardline bargaining position with Google would be more like "pay me what I want, or else I'll give it to all takers on the black market for maximum damage". That would be unethical and probably illegal to boot but it's a better definition of value than "1$ greater than max bid".
xprnio 7 hours ago [-]
The value to Google - sure. But the market value of the exploit itself - the black market I think is a factor in that regardless of what Google offers.
The value of something is dictated by what _the market_ offers, and just because Google throws a lowball price because _they_ don't value it doesn't necessarily mean that the value of the exploit itself is as low as they dictate.
There will always be someone who would screw Google just for the love of the game, and if they got a better price from elsewhere, I don't see why _morality_ would really play that big of a role. It all comes down to incentives, and if Google doesn't incentivize doing the good thing enough, then someone _will_ incentivize them to do the bad thing just a bit more.
noduerme 7 hours ago [-]
Well, the implication (and I'm not saying this is right) is that to Google it's only worth $1k to have this brought to their attention by a white hat, versus finding out by exploitation.
Which means that they have zero concern from this incident about reputational damage to themselves or their browser. That's pretty good circumstantial evidence of a monopolistic practice, when you can safely assume that there's effectively no difference to your bottom line if your software is hacked.
thayne 6 hours ago [-]
But google is also a monopsony. There isn't anyone else the researcher can ethically sell it to. They just have to take whatever bounty google decides to pay.
noduerme 6 hours ago [-]
I'm just saying it's more evidence that Google should be broken up.
xnx 4 hours ago [-]
How would you break up Google that would make browsers more secure?
CookieCrisp 13 hours ago [-]
While I agree 1000 is hilariously low for this, worth is hard to quantify. Do you pay what it could theoretically cost your company? the amount the top bidding bad actor would be willing to pay?
altairprime 12 hours ago [-]
The discount Google is getting on bounties versus internal spend is easy to estimate:
# assumed to be $0.5mil USD or greater
A := What quantity of salaries-and-benefits and AI-dollars does Google spend on zero-day research?
# assumed to be greater than zero
B := How many full sandbox RCEs are they *hoping* to discover per year with that budget?
# $/RCE budgeted spend
C := A ÷ B
# $/bounty
D := $1000 USD
# % discount per bounty relative to in-house spend
E := (C - D) / C
While we lack the data to be sure, it is reasonable to estimate that they're getting a discount of 90% or better versus internal spend on this bounty payment, if one assumes that they do not have many sandbox RCEs left undiscovered. It's unclear whether that assumption holds, but with only a single researcher at an assumed $0.5mil/year (all-inclusive after pay, stock, and benefits) is enough to support the plausibility of that 90% figure, before accounting at market rates for their internal use of the house AIs.
So, the most likely case is that they're greedy and miserly, and hope we don't do the math. However I recognize that there are judgment calls to be made here. Either their internal spending finds hundreds of RCEs per year, or they're significantly discounting bounty payments versus their actual worth, or they're negligent in budgeting for RCE discovery at all, or they assign zero value to the security of the Chromium platform underpinning Edge, Electron, et al. All of these are bad in different ways; one hopes a competent tech reporter actually pursues this line of questioning with them!
cogman10 11 hours ago [-]
> or they're negligent in budgeting for RCE discovery at all, or they assign zero value to the security of the Chromium platform underpinning Edge, Electron, et al
I generally agree, but a 3rd explanation is they figure that too generous a bounty will flood them with reports of minor issues making major ones harder to see (and costing time and money to verify that could be spent looking for security issues).
altairprime 7 hours ago [-]
Having previously worked near a bounty program, I can confirm that they are regardless flooded with people fishing for bounties, even before AI, no matter how cheap the bounty may be — people will grift anything with the most pathetic skript kiddie attempts possible to try and pad their resume with a hit, and bounties that pay $0 are more valuable than pull requests that pay $0.
quotemstr 13 hours ago [-]
You let the market decide. Google could purchase the bugs on the same market blackhats do.
tptacek 12 hours ago [-]
Google directly competes with the grey market for vulnerabilities. They are competitive in a bunch of different directions:
* They pay for vulnerabilities without reliable exploits (more for vulnerabilities that are demonstrably reliable).
* They don't require you to actually build a reliable exploit chain.
* They pay up front, not in tranches.
* They work with essentially all comers, unlike the grey market, where you're generally subcontracting to sell your first few.
jeffbee 10 hours ago [-]
They pay in plain old money, too. On the market your counterparty will be a criminal who is trying to scam you every step of the way.
tptacek 10 hours ago [-]
Not so much, the grey market is pretty well structured.
paulhebert 9 hours ago [-]
Is there anywhere I could read more about this?
Sound very interesting!
ajkjk 12 hours ago [-]
we really do not want to engineer a system in which using bugs to make money is considered economically legitimate activity. It is still crime. The main reason to report bugs and get the bounties for doing so is still because it makes the world safer and healthier. The money is there to make is to incentivize the work of finding and reporting them -- not to outbid the bad actors.
necovek 4 hours ago [-]
I would say that maintaining legacy systems as a software engineer is effectively "using bugs to make money" and very much an "economically legitimate activity".
If old systems had no bugs/issues, companies could do without the maintenance burden altogether (which includes even systems not being evolved/extended).
Alive-in-2025 12 hours ago [-]
Companies sometimes reward their employees with important bug fixes. When I worked on a big dev team, we'd even decide what were the most important fixes and give people a special 5k bonus or something.
But they weren't security issues necessarily. I never thought about it, fixing a huge performance issue is big. A security fix that gets caught early makes no noise so you just don't know how important it would have been. We also once had a really terrible bug that lead to lots of customers getting effectively attacked.
codedokode 11 hours ago [-]
"Crime" is very flexible term. One country's criminal is another country hero. Maybe the author would sell the vulnerability to an organization making exploits for government use.
"Safety" is also a relative thing, when the world is safer for one party, it is usually worse for another.
allendoerfer 7 hours ago [-]
Having secure browsers, encryption etc. actually clearly benefits the world. No “but think about the children/terrorists” please.
simonra 4 hours ago [-]
As our surroundings grow more secure, the justice system variant of swatting becomes a greater portion of the threats to worry about. There will be abuseable bugs and situations in our non static world, there is no way we'll ever have perfect security of anything. So a motivated actor with a grudge should be able to plant something a place you provably beyond reasonable doubt have sole control of, given enough time. How do you propose then that we secure deniability once the justice system is wielded as a weapon against the innocent, when everyone feels that there is no reasonable way defects exist and could have been used? Just look at the British post office scandal, real world justice systems have already operated under the assumption that software doesn't have bugs for decades, which speaks volumes on their inclination to believe that they both exist and are used by a unknown third party with ill intent. Thus the widespread trust in that things are secure is a threat in itself. And unlike airports we don't need the users to have an artificial sense of security for computers, networks, software, and digital services to be viable markets.
kube-system 11 hours ago [-]
> we really do not want to engineer a system in which using bugs to make money is considered economically legitimate activity. It is still crime.
"Making money from bugs" is not solely a black-market activity. There are plenty of grey and even white hat activities in this market.
bothers 11 hours ago [-]
> The main reason to report bugs and get the bounties for doing so is still because it makes the world safer and healthier.
Yeah let's see how this plays out, paying people less than their time is worth for RCEs.
flutas 12 hours ago [-]
Finding bugs is hardly a crime, selling them even isn't.
Now exploiting them? Yes that's a crime.
0xbadcafebee 10 hours ago [-]
> using bugs to make money
Aka security research.
It's one thing to hold something for ransom ("give me $5M or I release the 0day"). It's another to sell a valuable piece of information ("give me $5M if you want the 0day"). As long as you're only offering the bug to the company who would be impacted by its release, there's nothing unethical about asking for payment.
Maybe you think that, ethically, all bugs should be reported, regardless of payment, because it prevents harm. Well a lot of things prevent harm that we don't all take it upon ourselves to do voluntarily. Should everyone do all safety-related work for free? If we don't want to do it for free, should we not do safety work at all?
If the company really wanted it safe, and they can't make it safe themselves, they can pay someone else to make it safe. If they aren't willing to do that, then nobody is obligated to do free work for them, because we don't require anyone else to do safety-critical work for free. Let's not forget, this isn't a scrappy startup struggling for a seed round, this is one of the world's largest corporations with billions of dollars in cash. If they want your labor, make them pay for it.
wafflemaker 7 hours ago [-]
>Well a lot of things prevent harm that we don't all take it upon ourselves to do voluntarily. Should everyone do all safety-related work for free?
Thanks for putting it like that, it changed my opinion on the subject.
If it's normal to expect people to be compensated for other security work, it implies it should also be normal to compensate security researches.
avazhi 9 hours ago [-]
> using bugs to make money [is a crime]
No it’s not lol
bawolff 12 hours ago [-]
Well, someone did decide to tell google about this in exchange for a thousand dollars (albeit unclear how much the money was the motivator). Doesn't that mean the market did decide in google's favour?
drdexebtjl 11 hours ago [-]
Someone decided to tell Google about this in exchange for an unknown amount of money, chosen unilaterally by Google at a later date, at which point the market value of the vulnerability is $0.
There's no way money is the motivator.
bawolff 10 hours ago [-]
Money is not the only coin to pay someone in.
asdfaoeu 12 hours ago [-]
Blackhat markets will always be able to pay better. Selling to Google though you aren't chancing jail time.
quotemstr 12 hours ago [-]
> Blackhat markets will always be able to pay better.
... than Google?
> Selling to Google though you aren't chancing jail time.
Why would you go to jail for selling a vulnerability? It's free speech.
ajkjk 12 hours ago [-]
"Aiding and Abetting" crime is also a crime. Free speech has nothing to do with it.
quotemstr 11 hours ago [-]
Has anyone actually been convicted of abetting a crime by selling a vulnerability, by itself, not conspiring with the buyer to commit a crime using said vulnerability? Not as far as I can see. It would be absurd to jail someone for accurately describing a bug.
10 hours ago [-]
literalAardvark 7 hours ago [-]
"this vulnerability is being sold for research purposes only and must never be used outside of a tightly controlled research sandbox"
Loughla 11 hours ago [-]
Telling someone the steps to rob a bank world probably catch you some charges, I'm assuming.
quotemstr 11 hours ago [-]
No, it wouldn't.
readme 12 hours ago [-]
They would be broke quick.
jsw97 13 hours ago [-]
In the past I would have thought this would incentivize finding bugs that might never be found. However it is now clear that all bugs that can be found will be found. So this makes a ton of sense.
eru 13 hours ago [-]
> In the past I would have thought this would incentivize finding bugs that might never be found.
Isn't that a good thing?
> However it is now clear that all bugs that can be found will be found. So this makes a ton of sense.
If Google can find all the bugs nowadays, presumably with AI, why still pay a bug bounty? At least by this logic, bug bounties make less sense now.
jsw97 12 hours ago [-]
Sure they make sense — you need some incentive to drive the price to zero.
DANmode 10 hours ago [-]
Because there’s still a sizable group of people who see $1,000 from Google as more than $1,000.
Even a resume item.
12 hours ago [-]
teravor 13 hours ago [-]
ideally, an auction and the vendor or a government can bid against malicious actors (which can also be a government). hard to set up though.
eru 13 hours ago [-]
What kind of auction would you like to run?
Remember that you can sell the same vulnerability to multiple people: it's software you can copy.
Barbing 12 hours ago [-]
Maybe needs a Good-Guy-Buy-It-Now w/instant delivery at a fair price. (OK that’s kind of a threat—you’re running an auction and you have the price the corp has to pay to avoid the auction ending.)
$1k is so dumb and the fact we’re discussing auctions is proof (hello, Sundar, what you doing over there?).
Guess this will change after the next e.g. nationwide hospital ransomware by a hacker who publicly laments bounty rates, if the news cycle accommodates the story long enough.
27183 13 hours ago [-]
it seems unlikely google's lawyers would go for this
aeonik 13 hours ago [-]
Maybe some code is so important and heavily trafficked it becomes a public works project, and various legs can bid for pieces of the project, line how all infrastructure works.
teravor 13 hours ago [-]
well that's why setting it up is hard, because you would want to do it in a way that what they want doesn't matter.
socalgal2 8 hours ago [-]
you're taking someone's word it's being exploited. It says right at the top of the report
> allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code *inside the sandbox*
A bug in V8 leads to code execution in Chrome's web page process. It does not lead to execution in general. For that you need other exploits that escape the web page process. Those are not detailed here. This CVE is not a big deal. You're responding the poster's title, not the actual CVE
roywiggins 6 hours ago [-]
> I chained this bug with an n-day sandbox escape and flagged the v8CTF.
The potential damage is all to users bound by terms and conditions, who are unlikely to collect damages successfully from a vendor. Structurally, vendors don’t have to care. Therefore, vulnerabilities have little direct financial value to a vendor.
It’s natural to feel cognitive dissonance because the value to the vendor is so disproportionate to the potential harm to users, but the incentive structure is what it is.
A vulnerability which lets an attacker harm the vendor has much higher direct financial value.
Issue3299 9 hours ago [-]
Makes you wonder how many hacks wouldn't have occurred if security researchers (and vulnerability disclosure) was actually rewarded proportional to the possible/potential damage said vulnerability may have otherwise caused.
It's insulting how poorly incentivised white hats are, just look at how much North Korea is raking in with their cyber shenanigans - current estimates put it at around $6.75 billion to date (over the past 10 years or so).
paxys 12 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of people out there who find vulnerabilities and sell them to the highest bidder. Anyone is welcome to do it, including the researchers and hackers reporting them responsibly. There's no need to try and make a convoluted ethical justification. "I did this bad thing because you didn't pay me enough not to" doesn't work past the 6th grade.
strictnein 12 hours ago [-]
If this would have included a full RCE chain with Sandbox escape Google would have paid significantly more.
Having just a Sandbox RCE is neat, I've got some on my laptop currently, but it's just a piece of the puzzle.
computably 13 hours ago [-]
> How much do you think an organization like Google would spend on, for example, AI tokens or compute to detect this internally before it was found and exploited in the wild?
On average, probably not that much. What's the amortized cost of all testing, static analysis, and audit / code review, per "prevented potential bug"?
r_lee 12 hours ago [-]
this is why again, researchers should just honestly sell these to vuln brokers instead of donating them to trillion dollar companies for nothing.
nothing will change until big tech can no longer rip off security researchers
nullbio 9 hours ago [-]
They're not going to stop underpaying security researchers just because security researchers decide to sell them to vuln brokers. Advocating for this is reckless.
r_lee 2 hours ago [-]
they will if it becomes common knowledge that nobody serious is participating in their bug bounty programs. besides, they have incredibly deep pockets and they can afford to pay 6 figures for bugs like these
advocating for this is much more ethical than donating money to Google. I'd rather have that money go my family than a multi trillion dollar company.
DANmode 9 hours ago [-]
But my “Google paid me” on my resume!
3 hours ago [-]
bawolff 12 hours ago [-]
> But at the same time, if someone submits a critical issue like this, it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth.
I'd point out that part of the reason the grey and black market pays so well is because it is that type of market. You have to pay people extra to look past their morals and a risk premium against potential reputational and legal consequences.
That said, the gap is probably not just that.
s1artibartfast 12 hours ago [-]
It seems like by definition it is.
Someone could sell it on the black market, sell it to Google, or just move on with their life and not sell it.
I don't know what this is worth on the black market, maybe I'd be scammed by even trying to sell it. Maybe I don't want to be a bad person. These are all things that go into the prices
arjie 12 hours ago [-]
Interesting question, and how much should a user pay Google to fix the vulnerability? I suppose the smallest unit of currency less than the amount of effort they'd have to put in to mitigate it. A fully market economy of bug fixing here is an interesting idea, certainly, but if I'm being honest I actually don't want to pay Google a thousand dollars to fix security issues. In the limit, what would happen is that I end up with the competitor browser Elgoog Emorhc which fixes security issues for free, and pays very little for them, which is the status quo.
In the world where security issues are paid for entirely at market rate, it would also be very important to not use browsers by poor groups because they would be unable to pay for security reports on the market and consequently the browsers would be less secure.
Interesting idea, for sure, but I don't think it lands in a place I want to go since I neither desire stochastic payments nor desire that all browsers should be from large corporations.
babuskov 4 hours ago [-]
With such low payment, it makes one wonder how many exploits exist which were sold to 3rd parties and are currently used in the wild without Google even knowing about it.
klm127 7 hours ago [-]
I heard, on the podcast Darknet Diaries, that there are auctions for zero days in Argentina. This security researcher could probably have cleared a million dollars for a bug like that if they were unscrupulous. The bug bounty should absolutely be higher.
12 hours ago [-]
dataflow 12 hours ago [-]
It sounds insultingly low, yeah. I'm trying to imagine why they would pay so little. The only two reasons I can think of are either (a) they were already aware of it and fixing it, and therefore the report didn't really change much, or (b) it requires an unusual configuration or otherwise rare opportunity to that makes it impractical to exploit most users. Really curious to see what the issue was whenever it gets made public.
solenoid0937 12 hours ago [-]
(c) there are so many undiscovered vulnerabilities that it doesn't make sense for them to offer a decent payout
10 hours ago [-]
spacedoutman 12 hours ago [-]
"because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment"
Maybe they should now, not like anyone else cares about ethics anyway.
Alive-in-2025 12 hours ago [-]
Imagine the consideration for the Trump admin, should we pay this guy a million bucks for this attack that gets us into the command system of Iran, or would that be unethical. Of course they don't consider that at this time.
noja 3 hours ago [-]
> how much do you think this vulnerability is actually worth? How much do you think an organization like Google would spend on, for example, AI tokens or compute to detect this internally before it was found and exploited in the wild?
What? That's not how you calculate the value of something at all.
The value is not based on the prevention, it's the cost of the cure.
gblargg 10 hours ago [-]
People are free to pool their money and offer higher bounties.
martyfunkhouser 11 hours ago [-]
If you really explore the concept of worth, Google "engineers" are grossly overpaid, otherwise they would have found this themselves already.
How many PMs are making more than bug bounties to fetch coffee and bagels?
Their priorities are all out of order.
9 hours ago [-]
Mtinie 12 hours ago [-]
> Ethical disclosure is a complicated topic, because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment.
Why not? Capitalism requires they maximize their value. These profitable companies lay bare at the altar, so they should understand the requirements of their god.
esseph 13 hours ago [-]
The problem is they are being flooded with both fake AND real disclosures. Imagine if they tried to pay out $250,000 or more per bug? Would the cost be worth it? Maybe, but shareholders may not be pleased... Unless they viewed it as insurance against it being more financially sound for the finder to sell the exploit on the gray or black market instead...
Barbing 12 hours ago [-]
Pre-flood, they didn’t pay more did they?
> viewed it as insurance
Of course. Beyond the ethics, the social obligation, sleeping well at night by compensating hardworking people fairly.
“We can’t pay more or we’d have to hire more human reviewers” should never be a massive company’s line of thinking.
They should just multiply a base rate against the severity level. Say the base rate is ranged so low-severity stuff is $500-1K base but high-severity stuff is $10K base. That would net a researcher ~$88K for this specific bug (8.8 severity).
SteveNuts 11 hours ago [-]
That would create a perverse incentive to inflate the severity levels even more than they already are
rglover 1 hours ago [-]
It doesn't have to. Just put a cap and say "we officially recognize 1-10" and be done with it.
vlovich123 12 hours ago [-]
CVE severity is a terrible way to do this. If you follow the cybersecurity space you should know why.
rglover 1 hours ago [-]
It's a simple multiplier number and you can set a cap on it (and payout amounts). Where's the fire?
r_lee 12 hours ago [-]
it's such a drop in the bucket, it wouldn't make any difference
vasco 7 hours ago [-]
You've been on HN for 16 years and still comment the lowest brow possible comment on security vulnerability threads that the bounty isn't big enough. How many times do we need to have a top comment crying about the same thing? If you think its too little, sell the exploits you find for more.
wilg 12 hours ago [-]
Seems like it was worth $1000 to the researcher in question.
12 hours ago [-]
paulpauper 12 hours ago [-]
The CVE associated with it (CVE-2026-85046) is already being exploited in the wild. If we put our thinking caps on, how much do you think this vulnerability is actually worth? How much do you think an organization like Google would spend on, for example, AI tokens or compute to detect this internally before it was found and exploited in the wild?
in the darkweb, due to crypto, a lot. there is where the $ is, whether it's stealing crypto directly or phishing developers.
avazhi 9 hours ago [-]
> Ethical disclosure is a complicated topic, because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment.
I mean, why not?
fuzzfactor 11 hours ago [-]
>researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment.
Hell no, the same level bugs at Google should be enthusiastically paid way more than from an undercapitalized startup, who actually needs the help more so. Should be orders of magnitude difference in relation to scale.
>it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth.
Honest fair-dealing should come into play at least but there are some players who have struck it so rich they can now take enough pride to pay an additional premium just because they can, and their good human nature almost compels them ethically to do way more than the minimum.
Just apparently not at Google.
If a company has achieved financial success to a degree that they are no longer worried about complete failure for the foreseeable future, then it's only a matter of generosity vs Scrooge-like behavior.
What's missing from their overall business acumen if they can't even afford to project an image of generosity yet?
If they're not actively making a serious effort to pay the maximum they can well afford for bugs that are truly serious, there is a technical term for that. Chickenshit.
publlus_enigma 13 hours ago [-]
Normalising running arbitrary code delivered over the internet (in the form of JavaScript and WASM), as a necessary condition for accessing most web pages may not have been one of the best decisions we have made.
dingdong2026 5 hours ago [-]
My thought exactly.
Which is why I have NoScript in my Firefox and have gotten used to manually enabling javascript for select pages. Small price to pay.
Unfortunately the web is full of trivial websites that have no business running javascript. Recently wanted to read the famed post on Gates Notes. But for some reason Bill requires javascript to render text and images. Which reminded me Bill is not a person with good judgement on matters of IT and policy. Time saved.
razemio 5 hours ago [-]
Wow... I understand your point but if you feel that strong about gates using js on his personal website, it is a bit harsh isn't it? Could have multiple reasons why it is needed. Especially for someone with such a huge follower base. Lazy loading, tracking, client based adjustments, using a framework, fun [:)]... I could go on with a 100 more points why js might be needed.
dijit 3 hours ago [-]
I know that this is sarcasm, but there are people who really think this.
They get emotional (usually angry) when you tell them you disable javascript- as if every site that serves any kind of content has an automatic entitlement to run arbitrary code on your computer.
pizlonator 11 hours ago [-]
I think the problem is that we've let JS engines become absurdly complex so there's no way to avoid them having really gross bugs.
That said, I think that the V8 team has done a fantastic job of securing their engine. Their heap sandbox feature is really inspiring! It's really wild that (as far as I can understand this issue) someone is able to bypass it.
(Posted from a memory safe browser - WebKit MiniBrowser compiled with Fil-C. Pretty sure this is safer than even V8 and the heap sandbox.)
ruuda 6 hours ago [-]
In Chromium you can turn off V8's JIT compiler for this reason. You can even opt in again for sites you trust that need the additional performance.
a022311 5 hours ago [-]
I'm glad I've already done that! I haven't seen any difference in performance like others mention though. Weird. The only override I've made is for a website which needs to run some client-side cryptography code and it would take ages without the JIT.
creshal 7 hours ago [-]
> Posted from a memory safe browser - WebKit MiniBrowser compiled with Fil-C. Pretty sure this is safer than even V8 and the heap sandbox.
It's easy to be safer, as long as performance can be sacrificed for it.
vanderZwan 7 hours ago [-]
We live in a world where my laptop is forced to waste tons of computational power on immensely bloated websites even with ad-block, with now even having to worry about agentic bullshit that I didn't ask for, and plenty of others apparently still think throwing computational cycles at cryptocurrency is good for anything.
Complaining about a relatively small performance price for Fil-C in that context honestly feels like that one famous newspaper photo of a smoking pregnant woman drinking a beer with a caption saying she's wbrried about the effects of the loud construction noises next door on her unborn child.
Except even that is wrong, because at least she had a point about the construction noises, while this is more of a "refusing to eat your vegetables" kind of situation.
ChocolateGod 4 hours ago [-]
We also live in a world where site owners purposely put anime cat girls on their websites that serve no purpose then to waste cpu cycles.
vanderZwan 2 hours ago [-]
Using personal websites read by a handful of programmer nerds that work fine if you turn off javascript to justify literally everyone else being forced to navigate bloated, broken company websites isn't particularly convincing as an argument against memory-safe C imo.
tclancy 2 hours ago [-]
Perhaps you do.
zahlman 52 minutes ago [-]
And people ask me why I complain about web pages failing to display basic content without JS.
(I keep WASM and WebGL disabled in Firefox settings, too. Yes, I had another post ITT questioning why those things are any less secure than the JavaScript, given that they're supposed to be in a sandbox. But you know, defense in depth. It's insane that we're expected to put up with these grossly unnecessary risks all the time. Just like how it's insane that frontier models are being tested in environments that are physically capable of connecting to the Internet at large.)
robalni 6 hours ago [-]
That's basically the comment I was just going to write but you made me not need to.
We need simpler protocols and formats, especially those that are used over the internet.
I want everyone to really start fighting for this.
I always use a browser that doesn't run any scripts (w3m) for both this reason and others.
It hurts when I see websites that don't work without js.
A bit funny though that this page is one of them so I was not able to read it.
phoghed 31 minutes ago [-]
We have them, and have had them for a long time. Nobody wants to use them.
throwaway27448 19 minutes ago [-]
> Nobody wants to use them.
Wikipedia is basically the most popular application of all time and it doesn't rely on javascript. People just generally don't give a shit about where their money goes.
Levitating 5 hours ago [-]
> We need simpler protocols and formats
But we do! It doesn't get much simpler than HTML/CSS/JS. It's just abused to make apps instead of web documents.
christophilus 49 minutes ago [-]
Hm. HTML, maybe. CSS and JS? No way. View the CSS here sometime:
Running code by itself isn't that bad, it's the fact that browser developers have decided for some reason that this code needs to be as performant as possible, so, JIT.
I don't get it! The way JS is typically used, it doesn't even benefit from JIT all that much. Making ajax requests, doing stuff with strings, and moving DOM elements around doesn't need every CPU clock cycle to be used as optimally as possible. It's exceedingly rare for websites to actually be doing something that needs raw performance. And SPAs will be slow no matter what.
varenc 9 hours ago [-]
I disagree about JIT performance not mattering. I enabled "Lockdown Mode" on iOS which disables the JIT for the mentioned security reasons, and it causes a very noticeable lagginess on many sites. Of course, the primary cause is the unnecessary JS monstrosities wasting CPU cycles. But practically speaking I can say that disabling the JIT results in a very subpar experience of many JS heavy pages.
mark_l_watson 6 minutes ago [-]
I have used Lockdown mode also. Not that inconvenient but I didn’t mind the slight no JIT slowdown. I did find not seeing some images annoying.
Rohansi 9 hours ago [-]
It will also increase power consumption because your CPU has to do more work to run the same code.
timr 8 hours ago [-]
That's largely because a lot of developers have made the devil's bargain of replacing standard web stuff with badly re-implemented JS versions of same. People did it because they could, but never considered if they should.
See most of the ecosystem around React, for reference. It's idiotic that things like URL management are done in Javascript. Or form controls. I guarantee that if we stopped doing this kind of stuff, JIT wouldn't matter.
To some extent this is just saying "developers will depend upon the performance given to them", and that's true, but it's also true that as soon as things like V8 and Node appeared, JS became ubiquitous. Pandora's container, if you will.
grishka 6 hours ago [-]
> See most of the ecosystem around React, for reference.
I've never used React myself, but what I've heard about it makes me question my own sanity. So are you going to tell me that instead of just updating the DOM tree directly I'm going to apply the changes to my data, then pass the entire model to the framework, which would then diff it with the previous version to get the changes back out, it would then call my functions that return components, and it would then diff the virtual DOM to find out what changed, and only then would it update the actual page? Why the fuck would anyone ever want that? What's so hard about simply changing the innerText or inserting elements or whatever?
Oh and now Google and Apple are insisting that this is the way to do UIs in native apps as well, with Compose and SwiftUI respectively.
The way the front end developer community seems to largely encourage learning top-down isn't helping either. I'll forever remember that one guy we made a small project with. He learned React but had no clue what "send a request" and "pass a parameter" means, and I had to explain him how to use XHR.
leptons 5 hours ago [-]
The DOM is the slowest part of the browser. It's not Javascript, it's the DOM. React is an attempt to manage the slowness of the DOM. One seemingly small change to a page (like setting innerText) can have many ripple effects with reflow on mamy parts of a page.
With thousands of DOM elements on a page, the DOM becomes a bottleneck. This isn't the fault of front-end developers, and it's not really the fault of browser developers. HTML/CSS/JS is a very powerful system, but it's also complex and can cost a lot of compute. When you understand this, then the reasons for React and other front-end frameworks become easier to accept.
grishka 4 hours ago [-]
> One seemingly small change to a page (like setting innerText) can have many ripple effects with reflow on mamy parts of a page.
I haven't looked into how browsers actually do it, but my mental model for it is that if something changes, this merely sets a flag on that element or its parent that its layout is not valid any more. Then, on next vsync, all the elements that have this flag set have their layout recalculated, potentially going up the tree as necessary. The only exception is if your script tries to get any layout-related property, e.g. offsetWidth. Then, as if as part of the getter of such a property, the layout recalculation will run immediately.
That is to say, if you need to make a lot of changes to the DOM, you should make them within one JS invocation so only one layout pass happens sometime after you're done.
timr 2 hours ago [-]
OP here. The steel-man argument for React is not that it is faster at rendering. It cannot be, because it ultimately relies on the same DOM that everyone else does to do the job, and it has to set up a massive JS data structure to do what it does, which uses a lot of memory and has big GC costs. Arguments that assert that the React virtual DOM are faster than the native/shadow DOM are simply wrong [1]. Even the React team admits this [2] (though back in the day, they made a number of puffed-up claims about speed that never made sense).
The principle argument in favor of React today are developer ergonomics. People don't have to manually alter individual elements anymore -- they just describe state, and React takes care of the UI change set. On top of that, you have components, etc., that are debatably more pleasant to work with, and at the least create an ecosystem advantage for users of the framework. One can certainly see the argument for something like facebook, where there are probably dozens of different things changing independently at any given time.
But that said, one really has to question whether React makes sense anymore, given LLMs. Back when the alternative was that someone had to bespoke code every UI component, it might have been worth taking the hit of having to adopt the entire React ecosystem. But now that LLMs are writing the code, there's really no argument for developer ergonomics, and suddenly, things like "rewriting URL handling in JS" are pure liabilities.
[1] Though sadly, many front-end devs don't know this.
You may not need react. If you want to make the smallest possible change to the dom to reduce latency, then make the smallest possible change to the dom. Choose solidjs. (Not a sponsored post).
tgv 6 hours ago [-]
The problem is not url management. That should happen just once or twice during the life cycle of a page. If it takes 0.1ms or 1ms doesn't have any impact on the usability.
One of my problems was that I wanted to show data in the browser. It is a convenient delivery platform, after all. However, Chrome (and Chrome in particular) has tremendous trouble displaying large pages. A 400x400 table takes a long time to render. I could solve that in JavaScript. I had to, really.
So, as practically always, the problems stem from a combination of factors, and bad programming definitely is one of them.
2 hours ago [-]
vickychijwani 7 hours ago [-]
That's largely because a lot of developers have made the devil's bargain of replacing standard hardware and OS primitives with badly re-implemented C versions of same. People did it because they could, but never considered if they should.
See most of the ecosystem around modern systems software, for reference. It's idiotic that things like memory layout and bit-level hardware management are done in C abstractions. I guarantee that if we stopped doing this kind of stuff, compiler optimizations wouldn't matter.
To some extent this is just saying "developers will depend upon the performance given to them", and that's true, but it's also true that as soon as things like compilers and standard libraries appeared, C became ubiquitous. Pandora's container, if you will.
timr 7 hours ago [-]
> It's idiotic that things like memory layout and bit-level hardware management are done in C abstractions. I guarantee that if we stopped doing this kind of stuff, compiler optimizations wouldn't matter.
Cute, but no, not even close to a good metaphor. The C example is abstracting away fundamental complexity in a new platform. The other is completely re-writing -- in duplicate and slightly broken -- what the platform gives you for free. There's nothing about implementing form controls or URL management in JS that is more abstract. It's just different; a downstream bad decision that branches off a long tree of other bad decisions.
The equivalent level of idiocy in a C-related metaphor would be...I dunno...if you decided that you didn't like the way that header files worked, and decided to keep the C compiler, but build an external header-file management system in Fortran [1] that calls the C compiler for you. Or even closer to the JS metaphor, you shipped a special C compiler that had an embedded interpreted language that only activated at compile time, and you then used that language to allow any user to fundamentally change the syntax of C.
(It hopefully shouldn't be lost on you that this exact approach to language features has been repeatedly tried in the javascript world, including right now, with package management. But see also: typescript, coffeescript before that, Dart, etc. Javascript is a mess, and history repeats itself with regularity about every 5 years.)
[1] ...and then you re-write that about sixty times, each time being slightly incompatible with the last, and all having different fundamental incompatibilities with C headers.
cookiengineer 7 hours ago [-]
you are talking about the effect, not the cause.
Sites are slow because with all that excess performance they do more tracking, instead of keeping the website as-is.
Because that's the only thing business managers can come up with in that situation. It's a misaligned goal of users vs businesses.
In my opinion the "user agent" behavior of browsers is long gone, because they're not acting on behalf of their users anymore. They're acting on behalf of businesses.
cute_boi 11 hours ago [-]
Agree. Chrome should just disable JIT by default and boom many website owner will start to optimize their website.
andrekandre 10 hours ago [-]
jira and confluence come to mind...
macintux 10 hours ago [-]
I suspect the people who agree to buy Jira & Confluence are not particularly heavy users of them. At least, that's the only explanation I can fathom for their continued sales.
DANmode 9 hours ago [-]
Is it their app’s features that are slow, or the analytics bolted on top?
shakna 8 hours ago [-]
Both. And all the dependencies of both are slow. And the dependencies of those are slow, too.
DANmode 9 hours ago [-]
> SPAs will be slow no matter what.
Uh…no?
You’re presumably talking about specific terrible prebuilt frameworks - not someone building a nice vanilla SPA.
grishka 9 hours ago [-]
At this point SPA pretty much implies React. But even if you optimize everything the best you could and avoid any third-party runtime dependencies, it's still going to be significantly more work to make API requests and do client-side rendering vs just rendering HTML server-side.
dvdkon 4 hours ago [-]
Not always. Consider an SPA that connects via WebSockets and streams in data, adding points to a chart. The JS-less alternative would be refreshing an SVG or even the whole page once a second. The SPA is clearly more efficient here (unless someone screws it up badly).
grishka 4 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't consider that an SPA at all, it's just a page with an interactive element. An SPA is something that renders everything client-side and uses a generic client API to talk to the backend. A telltale sign of an SPA is that the first thing you see when you open it is some sort of loading indicator instead of the actual page you're visiting.
realusername 5 hours ago [-]
I've never seen an SPA which scales properly and doesn't become a bloated mess, maybe that's possible but it's definitely harder to make it work than using traditional server side template rendering
flippingheck 11 hours ago [-]
> decision we have made
This might oversell the agency that practicioners have.
Sandboxed zero-install delivery will outcompete anything with more frictionful installs.
It's probably not the right model for a pacemaker though.
Web/JS has been a double-edged sword for FOSS: sure, I can run a free OS, but if most of my "apps" happen to be JS that I can't practically control, then I have won a battle and lost a war.
JacobKfromIRC 10 hours ago [-]
I wish Haketilo [1] would have caught on more. There's so many free JavaScript apps but we're mostly just missing a way to actually control which version or derivative of the JavaScript is run.
There's also the problem of most free apps not doing a good job of providing license info and a link to source code, but this could be sidestepped by a trusted repository which provides license info itself.
At this point it doesn't even feel good to flex evidence of a warning
But, anyone who thinks we need JS for a functional internet is fucking retarded
asveikau 12 hours ago [-]
I remember noticing this shift in nerd culture. In the early 2000s, it was common for people to say on places like Slashdot that they don't trust JavaScript and run their browser with it off. In the early 2010s, I noticed HN commenters thought this was insane, tinfoil hat type thinking.
Sharlin 10 minutes ago [-]
In the early 2000s JS was used for silly novelty effects and some rudimentary DOM manipulation with `innerHTML`.
In the early 2010s you had to have JS enabled for many sites to work at all. The cost:benefit equation had became entirely different.
Espressosaurus 12 hours ago [-]
It became insane because nothing bloody worked without Javascript some time in the early 2010s.
Like cellphones, javascript became necessary if you want to use webmail, access your bank's website, or whatever.
ThunderSizzle 12 hours ago [-]
I still run with u matrix though, and most third party requests can be limited, but I no longer have enough patience when a required page doesn't work - I'll just rely on ublock origin to work.
nixosbestos 12 hours ago [-]
I say this as someone does NOT disable JS in my main browser (because like, I have a job), but also knows a fair bit about why Firefox inside Tails now restarts in some cases...
It's the classic thing. Across every gdmf metric, excluding with "true empathy", no one *gives a fuck* until it affects them, or someone within (1-3) degrees of separatation. And having broad empathy is generally a good way to get yourself labeled/astrocized: both about as obvious "compriate" and obvious "adversary".
dbdr 7 hours ago [-]
Is compriate a typo, a neologism? I could not find a definition.
bawolff 12 hours ago [-]
In fairness, in the early 2000s they were probably right. Early browser security model was a bit of a mess. The fact that this article is even talked about is a sign of how much better things are.
Rendello 8 hours ago [-]
Plus add in Flash and Java applets.
whizzter 12 hours ago [-]
I still do "random" browsing in FF with NoScript, that said, I'll acknowledge the frequency of updates of Chrome,etc and years of hardening.
It's not the Bonzi-buddy and driveby-installed IE toolbars wild west of the early 00s.
nik282000 11 hours ago [-]
The browsers on the computers at work show that it is very much still the driveby tool-bar install days.
no-name-here 4 hours ago [-]
> it is very much still the driveby tool-bar install days
Can you please provide a link to a page where a “toolbar drive-by install” occurs?
l00sed 11 hours ago [-]
It's so ubiquitous and unavoidable at this point.. I was at a conference lecture in 2020 where someone was suggesting disabling JavaScript and I thought the same thing— how absurd. The times have really changed...
eru 13 hours ago [-]
In the future we can ask that your JaveScript and Wasm comes with a proof of being benign.
V8 as a runtime goes far deeper than just webpages.
ruuda 6 hours ago [-]
> Type confusion in V8
Fortunately I disabled js by default. Unfortunately, it breaks about 30% of the web. Including nvd.nist.gov, which shows a completely blank page without js enabled, even though with js it’s just a simple page with only static content.
terseus 4 hours ago [-]
> Unfortunately, it breaks about 30% of the web.
More like 99%
I use Firefox with Noscript and I'm _totally aware_ that almost no website works without allowing it JS.
Even using Noscript it's becoming more and more exhausting every year, it's plain impossible to browse the internet without JS at all.
internetter 5 hours ago [-]
> Unfortunately, it breaks about 30% of the web.
Only 30?
baobabKoodaa 40 minutes ago [-]
People who disable JS are very likely to have delusions like this.
gib444 4 hours ago [-]
> Unfortunately, it breaks about 30% of the web
Only 30%? In 2026? With CloudFlare and Anubis et al absolutely everywhere? Not to mention SPAs
throwaway27448 22 minutes ago [-]
Hell yea. Let's see some real leaks.
neuroticnews25 37 minutes ago [-]
I would guess it's now trivial for attackers to have an llm analyse every new commit to chromium repo linking to an issue that's 403 for security reasons, but maybe I'm missing something.
notatoad 23 minutes ago [-]
Equally trivial for Google to do the same thing. Is it trivial to do this in a way that exceeds googles own ability to detect flaws?
neuroticnews25 17 minutes ago [-]
What i meant is analyze fixes for already reported and fixed vulnerabilities before the updated version is pushed to users.
throwatdem12311 12 hours ago [-]
I’m so tired. I think I’m just going to get a job as a garbage man and cancel my internet.
Sha1rholder 5 hours ago [-]
Don't. Garbage Collector hurts your memory
iammrpayments 8 hours ago [-]
They just released a CVE for a garbage truck vulnerability where an attacker could brick the vehicle by exploiting the telemetry system these things now have preinstalled in factory.
jdironman 8 hours ago [-]
Sounds like much needed downtime for the person slinging the garbage then.
bombcar 1 hours ago [-]
You've not watched the poor guy have to reboot his truck, have you?
tclancy 2 hours ago [-]
Just in time.
jesse_dot_id 12 hours ago [-]
There's been a Chrome CVE like every week ever since it came out.
Is graphene even affected? JIT is disabled in default configurations.
d2kx 14 hours ago [-]
This issue is already fixed in Google Chrome (152.0.7977.83)
azakai 13 hours ago [-]
TFA says
> Type confusion in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 152.0.7977.82 allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code inside the sandbox via a crafted HTML page.
So it was fixed in 152.0.7977.82 (before .83), if I read that right.
ttsiodras 7 hours ago [-]
You read that right. From the article:
"Affected products: ... Up to (excluding) 152.0.7977.82"
.82 is fixed.
chuckadams 14 hours ago [-]
The release version just now updated to 152.0.7977.83 which has the fix.
fmajid 13 hours ago [-]
I upgraded Vivaldi, which is reporting 152.0.7977.112
14 hours ago [-]
no-name-here 4 hours ago [-]
Is the HN title true that it affects all "all Chromium versions"?
Per OP link, it only affects Chrome versions prior to .82; .82 was released as stable 2 days ago. [1]
(HN title also does not match the original title, which is the CVE ID -- not particularly intuitive.)
So basically, Edge, Brave and any other browser built on Chromium. Nice.
anonymars 11 hours ago [-]
Monocultures are great!
strenholme 10 hours ago [-]
There’s a reason I use Firefox (Gecko). Also, Ladybird—another completely different web engine—is really promising. I spent five hours building it from source, having it take about 8 gigabytes of space, and it perfectly renders my own webpages and blogs.
I have a feeling someone’s going to make an open source browser using Ladybird’s engine before Ladybird has official binaries.
pertique 10 hours ago [-]
Not to downplay the severity (patch your browsers!), but there have been 5-10 actively-exploited V8 type confusion vulnerabilities in the last year. I'd be curious if this one blew up because it was the only one that was posted, or if it barely crossed some line in the collective consciousness this time around.
RA2lover 6 hours ago [-]
I think it's the first one where the Chrome version fixing it has no Manifest V2 support at all.
basilikum 12 hours ago [-]
For what is this exploited in the wild when it doesn't include a sandbox escape?
Is this chained with n-days?
pizlonator 11 hours ago [-]
There's a risk that someone had been sitting on a sandbox escape that assumed having RCE inside the sandbox first, and so they'd been waiting for an RCE exactly like this one.
Those folks would not be disclosing their sandbox escape unless they were good guys.
(Posted with a memory safe WebKit, Fil-C FTW)
oynqr 4 hours ago [-]
You should add a disclaimer that you are the CEO of Fil-C. /s
In the context of this vulnerability, I doubt memory safety would have made much of a difference.
This is a great reminder though, currently doing a full userspace replacement on my 3D printer and Fil-C might be just what I need for the irreplaceable C parts.
pizdocalmin 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sebstefan 11 hours ago [-]
If it's in the CISA known exploited vulnerabilities catalog, tell me if I'm wrong but I assume people don't go around exploiting million dollar 0-days in public just to fuck around safely in a chrome sandbox.
So maybe we're going to see another CVE for the sandbox escape soon?
daveguy 11 hours ago [-]
Crypto mining would be one application. But also, combined with a sandbox escape would make it particularly devastating. Usually full control of a device takes at least two exploits given the layers of security present in OS and browser environments.
thenewnewguy 13 hours ago [-]
Does anybody have a source for the "actively exploited" part of the HN title?
"CISA maintains the authoritative source of vulnerabilities that have been exploited in the wild."
crtasm 13 hours ago [-]
This line, I think? >This CVE is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog
esseph 13 hours ago [-]
"Google has confirmed that an exploit exists in the wild but has not disclosed information about the threat actors, targeted organizations, or attack campaigns while the update is still rolling out."
mikeweiss 9 hours ago [-]
Isn't this exactly why there is a sandbox? What can the RCE actually do or obtain within the sandbox?
socalgal2 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, it says right in the CVE
> allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code *inside the sandbox*
9 hours ago [-]
malinono 4 hours ago [-]
Sandbox RCE again. Every "it's sandboxed so it's safe" pitch really means "we hope the sandbox holds." Not a security model, just a sentence.
soiax 4 hours ago [-]
The title is bad, it is not sandbox escape, it is "RCE inside the sandbox", so only RCE when sandbox is disabled.
theteapot 5 hours ago [-]
Is this known to be exploitable in any Electron apps, and specifically VSCode extensions?
noduerme 7 hours ago [-]
Just outta curiosity because I can't find it at a cursory look - what exactly would be the type (coersion?) that would allow v8 to execute arbitrary code? Is this like something in post data to nodejs that terminates early and is able to run exec or something, like unto a sql injection?
timschumi 5 hours ago [-]
The Chromium issue is not public yet, so let's go with a very simple example.
Let's say that you have a type confusion bug that (in terms of the interpreted language) allows you to use an Integer variable as an Array.
That sounds nonsensical when just considering the high-level language, but your computer is going to need something to work with when running a script. For an Integer variable it will for example store the value, and for an Array it would store a pointer to a data area (and that area then contains values).
Now, if the interpreter loses track of which type a certain variable is, then it will also not know whether to interpret the internal data as a plain value (arbitrarily chosen by the script/attacker) or a pointer to well-formed data (carefully chosen by the runtime).
As an immediate step, letting the attacker use an address of their choosing for array operations would allow them to read and write arbitrary memory that is reachable with this form of addressing.
I'm putting specific emphasis on "form of addressing" here, because the v8 authors have considered this possibility and put additional protections in place. Within the sandbox, "addresses" are limited to a size of 32 bits, and address within a dedicated 4 Gigabyte area that is specifically for interpreter data. Within that area you are not going to find a lot of critical data to affect outside operations, you'd have to find a way to escape that memory area first.
The next part is going to be a bit hazy because it's been some time since I did Chromium exploitation, and getting code execution within the sandbox from data writes is itself not an easy task.
Now, we have established that there is not a lot of terribly important data within the 4 GB area. The data managing the interpreter lives outside, and any JITed code will also live outside because it needs different access permissions. We only really get to play with Objects and their data.
Objects handling executable code are rare, but there are a few that are at least adjacent. Last time I checked, WASM was one feasible choice where you get reasonably predictable results with custom data, as it included a pointer to actual executable code that represents the WASM program.
Under the assumption that the WASM interpreter/compiler does its job correctly the full block of executable code will not be very interesting. However, any integer constant in the program will end up somewhere within the executable code, and that would give you enough controllable data to encode one or two arbitrary instructions and a relative jump to the next integer constant. To start execution at the first integer constant, we'd then just modify the Object data of the WASM program to slightly offset the entrypoint.
And that's the short form of a possible (and likely outdated) way of getting semi-arbitrary code execution within the sandbox (as we are running as a WASM program, and therefore have all the usual syscall restrictions and other security features engaged).
pizlonator 11 hours ago [-]
Sounds wild.
(Posted from memory safe WebKit; i.e. WebKit compiled with filcc and all of WebKit's dependencies compiled with filcc.)
yjftsjthsd-h 9 hours ago [-]
Wait, you have that working? What's the lowest friction to run it? Like, VM or docker container or...
Then build WebKit using do_cmake_yolo_simpler.sh in projects/webkitgtk-2.44.3
It's still pretty rough, but works more than well enough to post on HN. My regression test is to post on X. That works too
yjftsjthsd-h 8 hours ago [-]
Sweet, thanks. I guess running in a VM is also a bonus protective layer:)
pizlonator 8 hours ago [-]
lol yeah
Pls file bugs if you encounter issues.
Also, fair warning, it's hella slow right now on JS-heavy websites (like X). It barely works.
But we can fix that with some effort, I think
krackers 10 hours ago [-]
For it to be memory safe, do you have to disable the JIT?
pizlonator 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah
amluto 9 hours ago [-]
It sounds technically possible to build a JIT where a verifier checks that the JIT-generated code is correctly pizlonated before allowing it to become executable. :)
Ohentis 8 hours ago [-]
I think it makes more sense to verify that the jit is correct than to verify that it's output is correct at runtime.
pizlonator 8 hours ago [-]
Nah
It's damn near impossible to verify that the JIT is correct.
But it is possible to verify at runtime that the code that the JIT emitted obeys some memory safety law.
(V8's heap sandbox is an example of this; a sarcastic JIT would be an arguably stronger example of this.)
pizlonator 8 hours ago [-]
Yes
I have a new tech called SaRCAsm, which is a memory-safe assembler. So the next step is a "Sarcastic JIT" :-)
achierius 8 hours ago [-]
Is that just the MiniBrowser?!
I have to say I can't imagine daily driving that if so. Why WebKit over a Chromium-based (and more featureful) browser?
pizlonator 7 hours ago [-]
I'll port Epiphany eventually.
WebKit's JS engine (JavaScriptCore) is super friendly to pointer capabilities. I did not have to change much to make it use the Fil-C GC instead of its own GC and to make it use a capability per JS object.
On the other hand, Chromium's JS engine (V8) does a bunch of crazy stuff with pointer encoding, so the best you could do there is probably a single arena for the whole JS heap.
Also, JavaScriptCore has a well-supported mode that involves not only zero JIT but a fully portable C++ interpreter. Not sure V8 has that.
Good antivirus should protect you from such attacks.
Even zero day ones.
Woodi 8 hours ago [-]
struct MessageBuffer
{
int msgType;
union {
char *name;
int nameID;
};
};
That finally convinced me getting data using functions (accessors, getters, setters) is a good thing, even in C :) Just all that unnecesary if's are so annoing and killing performance...
Terr_ 14 hours ago [-]
As somebody who prefers to browse with JS off whenever possible, there's something absurd about the balance everyone takes for granted between (A) your personal safety against a devastating hack by malicious code and (B) surveillance advertising.
"Sorry, but to enter this shop you need to take one of the used syringes from that pile some dude delivers every day and poke yourself with it."
TZubiri 12 hours ago [-]
This seems irrelevant as the issue talks about being exploitable with a crafted HTML page, no mention of JS. If true, you would be able to be hit without js enabled.
krackers 12 hours ago [-]
It mentions a type confusion in V8. Is it possible to trigger that without JS enabled?
The "all chromium versions" part of the title is also misleading, most browser CVEs do not distinguish between "untested lower bound" vs "affects all" (even though it seems like it'd be trivial to bisect).
TZubiri 12 hours ago [-]
Why is this 8.8?
It's because User Interaction is Required. CVSS 10 would be the case where everyone can be exploited without interaction.
Interestingly the 8.8 is more alert-worthy than the 9.8 and 10 cvss, because there is a need to be alerted of the current security risk, whereas with a cvss 2 vuln, there is nothing to be done by users, only admins.
johnnyApplePRNG 12 hours ago [-]
NIST probably had this one filed and ready to announce years ago
like those news agencies have obituaries of famous old people pre-written
edoceo 11 hours ago [-]
I know a regular old geezer who's written his own obituary. Publish this when I die.
I bet famous people have their people write one to distribute immediately.
Also, writing those for your family sucks, easier to do it when they are alive and can tell some key stories.
petra303 14 hours ago [-]
Only a score of 8.8?
teravor 14 hours ago [-]
RCE inside sandbox, so requires chaining with another 0day.
zahlman 14 hours ago [-]
What exactly does "RCE inside sandbox" describe that goes beyond "the webpage can supply arbitrary JavaScript and the JavaScript engine executes it", but is still isolated from the system?
StilesCrisis 13 hours ago [-]
Chrome runs webpages in individual sandbox processes with very low privileges, as a defense-in-depth strategy. It generally requires at least two exploits to actually affect a user--first, get RCE in a sandboxed process, then find a separate vulnerability that lets you escape the sandbox process entirely. For this bug to have actually been used in the wild, there was almost certainly a second bug as well.
jimrandomh 13 hours ago [-]
It means it can execute native code inside the sandbox, as opposed to Javascript. While still sandboxed, this lets it access some parts of the attack surface that JS would not have been able to, some of which may have other exploits that allow escaping the rest of the way.
jnwatson 14 hours ago [-]
It means it can execute arbitrary machine code in the sandbox.
r_lee 14 hours ago [-]
I think people would like to understand what the "sandbox" is here and what isolation does it provide, is it an unprivileged process? something chromium specific? a v8/JS thing? etc.
ranger_danger 13 hours ago [-]
Seems to use OS-specific kernel syscall filtering facilities.
I would assume in this case that there's full renderer control, not just a bypass of the in-process isolation.
r_lee 13 hours ago [-]
great link, thanks
zahlman 13 hours ago [-]
Okay, and why is that more of a security risk than executing arbitrary JavaScript in the sandbox?
arcfour 12 hours ago [-]
Among other things, JavaScript in the browser has no way to even express "kill PID 1234 on the user's machine" or "list the contents of `C:\Users\Documents` and upload all of the files" or "spawn cmd.exe on the user's machine". How would you even do these things if you could run any JavaScript in the browser? You can't.
However, chrome.exe itself does because it's a native application, as is the sandboxed JavaScript interpreter inside of chrome.exe.
(This is a very oversimplified explanation but I think this is the disconnect people are having)
zahlman 1 hours ago [-]
Okay, but we're still talking about running machine code inside the sandbox, where that functionality is still not available.
bawolff 12 hours ago [-]
> JavaScript in the browser has no way to even express ... "list the contents of `C:\Users\Documents` and upload all of the files"
this is besides the point, but javascript has the file system api.
anyways to your broad point, i dont think this is convincing. What's the difference between not having an api vs having an api that is disabled (e.g. the syscall exists but is filtered). Either way you are not taking the action. RCE in the sandbox is an important step in the bigger exploit chain, but not because you can express things in the traditional syscalls inside the sandbox.
insanitybit 13 hours ago [-]
Because Javascript theoretically can't just access files on disk. Control over the render would let you do that, if not for the process level sandbox, which constraints things like file access, system, calls, etc.
But the process is still more capable than the VM. The process can talk to other processes via IPC, for example.
That's why you don't go from "javascript -> computer is taken over", instead you go from "javascript -> renderer control -> computer is taken over".
r_lee 13 hours ago [-]
because with proper code exec you can trigger other bugs to escalate beyond the sandbox, whereas with JS you'd have to find a bug to escape from JS to native
can't get a proper ios/Android RCE with just JS code exec
p-e-w 13 hours ago [-]
It can do some things that JS can’t do, such as invalid pointer writes. But you are correct that this doesn’t automatically imply system access.
TacticalCoder 13 hours ago [-]
> It means it can execute arbitrary machine code in the sandbox.
Well which is precisely why we have sandboxes.
To me "executing arbitrary code in the sandbox" is similar to "I don't give a flying fuck for it's what a sandbox is for".
More information is needed. As someone commented: this has to be paired with at least another exploit to make anything remotely useful.
A sandbox is a sandbox. We want to understand how "code running in a sandbox" is "actively exploited".
johnsmith1840 13 hours ago [-]
Memory isolation having one tab or account open on your bank and another on this page does not mean it could leak across the sandbox and steal bank account details but anything inside of your general page content can be lost
12 hours ago [-]
14 hours ago [-]
TZubiri 12 hours ago [-]
This doesn't affect the score though, the reason there's 1.2 points less than the max is because there is a Required User Interaction. The user needs to visit a specific html page.
Even with the sandbox protection layer, the rest of the parameters are maxed out.
iririririr 14 hours ago [-]
what is online ad networks for $100, alex
jeremyjh 12 hours ago [-]
I don't know why this is being downvoted. This is called malvertising and its one of the most significant vectors for exploiting a vulnerability like this. Its happened multiple times over the last two decades.
My read of Google's disclosure is that there is likely no known escape from the sandbox. I don't agree this would be reported this way just because "user action" like "using web browser" is required. Even if this individual CVE is correctly an 8.8 there would be a critical assessment of a known chain. The only reason there wouldn't be, would be if the other vulnerability is known to Google but has no patch yet.
12 hours ago [-]
radium3d 12 hours ago [-]
Doesn't everyone else immediately update everything on their computer before they start doing anything?
chrisjj 3 hours ago [-]
Is that frequent enough? I mean an update might be issued after you start doing something.
Invictus0 11 hours ago [-]
what planet are you living on
Animats 11 hours ago [-]
Chromium, or just Chrome?
10 hours ago [-]
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gib444 7 hours ago [-]
There's something funny about the site needing JavaScript to display anything
b8 9 hours ago [-]
$1k for this vuln is laughable. If the researcher wrote an exploit as the nday exploit devs did and sold it in the gray market they would of got significantly more.
eschaton 8 hours ago [-]
Anyone who sells such an exploit should go to prison.
b--l 7 hours ago [-]
Agreed--if you can catch them of course.
nazmul_ai 13 minutes ago [-]
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jewsdienow 7 hours ago [-]
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flippingheck 6 hours ago [-]
Does that somehow also explain why many (most?) desktop users survive with just a browser?
To be clear, I'm not saying it doesn't. I'm saying I don't understand.
jewsdienow 8 hours ago [-]
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colincowardly 14 hours ago [-]
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turpentine 8 hours ago [-]
What does your vibe-coded-in-C browser do to mitigate this kind of exploit?
jewsdienow 10 hours ago [-]
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DANmode 10 hours ago [-]
It’s not. Same as credible threats are also seen as nothing to do with free speech.
It just isn’t what free speech is.
It’s a separate thing.
fc417fc802 8 hours ago [-]
No, it is a limit on free speech but it is one of several that various governments (and cultures as a whole) throughout the world have upheld fairly consistently. Free speech is more or less an unachievable platonic ideal that we aspire to. Success varies, as do the compromises made along the way.
Speaking more generally, don't let your ideals bias your judgment. Just because you support policy X and also view ideal Y as good that doesn't mean that X isn't detrimental to Y. It's important to be objective about these things.
anonymousiam 13 hours ago [-]
Just one more reason to never use Chrome. Their removal of MV2 to prevent UBlock Origin from working is another.
fidotron 13 hours ago [-]
Chrome product management is horrible. Chrome software engineering is some of the best ever done.
(And no, I don't use it except for testing).
noir_lord 13 hours ago [-]
I don’t disagree, two or more things can be true at once.
That said I still use Firefox for other reasons.
I simply don’t trust google, I don’t trust Mozilla either but I do trust them more than Google and you do kinda have to have a browser to function in the modern world.
lima 13 hours ago [-]
Which browser has a better security track record?
bawolff 12 hours ago [-]
Despite what people are saying here, chrome has a really excellent track record. Nobody is perfect. Switching just because chrome got exploited one time will likely result in you switching to something worse.
If you're paranoid, disable JIT.
jacquesm 2 hours ago [-]
It's not about switching because chrome got exploited one time, it's about switching not to reward unethical behavior.
dwattttt 10 hours ago [-]
Or disable JS altogether, and enjoy many sites working much quicker. Many others fail & need to be selectively allowed, but it's been worth it.
doublerabbit 21 minutes ago [-]
If by quicker you mean blank content, I'll agree, it is worth it.
According to the Chrome release page (https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2026/09/stable-channel...), Google paid a researcher $1000 for ethically reporting this.
The CVE associated with it (CVE-2026-85046) is already being exploited in the wild. If we put our thinking caps on, how much do you think this vulnerability is actually worth? How much do you think an organization like Google would spend on, for example, AI tokens or compute to detect this internally before it was found and exploited in the wild?
Ethical disclosure is a complicated topic, because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment. But at the same time, if someone submits a critical issue like this, it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth. Why should a researcher be effectively penalized for responsibly telling a vendor instead of selling the bug to a "research firm" or three-letter agency?
It's one thing if you're an open source project maintainer just trying to put something out to the community. The math is a lot different if you're Google.
Further: a vulnerability is probably not worth that much either, even if it's a hypercapable vulnerability, because the grey market buys full enablement kits, not vulnerability information. People making 6 figures on vulnerabilities are selling fully enabled full chain exploit systems, not just intelligence about a sandbox escape.
AP recommends spaces around them, whereas Chicago doesn’t
besides if we’re critiquing incorrect following of English orthography
—Sentences should be capitalized
—The word “don’t” requires an apostrophe
—End sentences with a period
—That’s incorrect usage of an em-dash at the end there — but what does it matter anyways ;)
I hate that it's basically become the little hitler moustache of punctuation. There was at least one guy who was really enjoying his tiny little moustache until he couldn't anymore. That is the emdash for me.
Legendary.
Miss that shit too.
Ez way to shit on Windows users who had to double up endashes like they were impoverished.
I guess in your analogy the double endash is Stalin’s mustache and the Soviet Union in general - Gaudy, excessive, starving for more
Bug bounties are as much a way of attracting talent to even try to exploit your system as they are about the exploits themselves. If you lowball the bounties the talent goes elsewhere.
We shouldn't look to the black market as cost discovery for these vulnerabilities, most non-criminal researchers are not putting up an ask order and letting the black market compete with Google.
We absolutely should. One of the points of bug bounties is to discourage people from selling to the black market.
A hardline bargaining position with Google would be more like "pay me what I want, or else I'll give it to all takers on the black market for maximum damage". That would be unethical and probably illegal to boot but it's a better definition of value than "1$ greater than max bid".
The value of something is dictated by what _the market_ offers, and just because Google throws a lowball price because _they_ don't value it doesn't necessarily mean that the value of the exploit itself is as low as they dictate.
There will always be someone who would screw Google just for the love of the game, and if they got a better price from elsewhere, I don't see why _morality_ would really play that big of a role. It all comes down to incentives, and if Google doesn't incentivize doing the good thing enough, then someone _will_ incentivize them to do the bad thing just a bit more.
Which means that they have zero concern from this incident about reputational damage to themselves or their browser. That's pretty good circumstantial evidence of a monopolistic practice, when you can safely assume that there's effectively no difference to your bottom line if your software is hacked.
So, the most likely case is that they're greedy and miserly, and hope we don't do the math. However I recognize that there are judgment calls to be made here. Either their internal spending finds hundreds of RCEs per year, or they're significantly discounting bounty payments versus their actual worth, or they're negligent in budgeting for RCE discovery at all, or they assign zero value to the security of the Chromium platform underpinning Edge, Electron, et al. All of these are bad in different ways; one hopes a competent tech reporter actually pursues this line of questioning with them!
I generally agree, but a 3rd explanation is they figure that too generous a bounty will flood them with reports of minor issues making major ones harder to see (and costing time and money to verify that could be spent looking for security issues).
* They pay for vulnerabilities without reliable exploits (more for vulnerabilities that are demonstrably reliable).
* They don't require you to actually build a reliable exploit chain.
* They pay up front, not in tranches.
* They work with essentially all comers, unlike the grey market, where you're generally subcontracting to sell your first few.
Sound very interesting!
If old systems had no bugs/issues, companies could do without the maintenance burden altogether (which includes even systems not being evolved/extended).
But they weren't security issues necessarily. I never thought about it, fixing a huge performance issue is big. A security fix that gets caught early makes no noise so you just don't know how important it would have been. We also once had a really terrible bug that lead to lots of customers getting effectively attacked.
"Safety" is also a relative thing, when the world is safer for one party, it is usually worse for another.
"Making money from bugs" is not solely a black-market activity. There are plenty of grey and even white hat activities in this market.
Yeah let's see how this plays out, paying people less than their time is worth for RCEs.
Now exploiting them? Yes that's a crime.
Aka security research.
It's one thing to hold something for ransom ("give me $5M or I release the 0day"). It's another to sell a valuable piece of information ("give me $5M if you want the 0day"). As long as you're only offering the bug to the company who would be impacted by its release, there's nothing unethical about asking for payment.
Maybe you think that, ethically, all bugs should be reported, regardless of payment, because it prevents harm. Well a lot of things prevent harm that we don't all take it upon ourselves to do voluntarily. Should everyone do all safety-related work for free? If we don't want to do it for free, should we not do safety work at all?
If the company really wanted it safe, and they can't make it safe themselves, they can pay someone else to make it safe. If they aren't willing to do that, then nobody is obligated to do free work for them, because we don't require anyone else to do safety-critical work for free. Let's not forget, this isn't a scrappy startup struggling for a seed round, this is one of the world's largest corporations with billions of dollars in cash. If they want your labor, make them pay for it.
Thanks for putting it like that, it changed my opinion on the subject.
If it's normal to expect people to be compensated for other security work, it implies it should also be normal to compensate security researches.
No it’s not lol
There's no way money is the motivator.
... than Google?
> Selling to Google though you aren't chancing jail time.
Why would you go to jail for selling a vulnerability? It's free speech.
Isn't that a good thing?
> However it is now clear that all bugs that can be found will be found. So this makes a ton of sense.
If Google can find all the bugs nowadays, presumably with AI, why still pay a bug bounty? At least by this logic, bug bounties make less sense now.
Even a resume item.
Remember that you can sell the same vulnerability to multiple people: it's software you can copy.
$1k is so dumb and the fact we’re discussing auctions is proof (hello, Sundar, what you doing over there?).
Guess this will change after the next e.g. nationwide hospital ransomware by a hacker who publicly laments bounty rates, if the news cycle accommodates the story long enough.
> allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code *inside the sandbox*
A bug in V8 leads to code execution in Chrome's web page process. It does not lead to execution in general. For that you need other exploits that escape the web page process. Those are not detailed here. This CVE is not a big deal. You're responding the poster's title, not the actual CVE
https://serotav.github.io/Writeups/v8/when-sorting-leads-to-...
It’s natural to feel cognitive dissonance because the value to the vendor is so disproportionate to the potential harm to users, but the incentive structure is what it is.
A vulnerability which lets an attacker harm the vendor has much higher direct financial value.
It's insulting how poorly incentivised white hats are, just look at how much North Korea is raking in with their cyber shenanigans - current estimates put it at around $6.75 billion to date (over the past 10 years or so).
Having just a Sandbox RCE is neat, I've got some on my laptop currently, but it's just a piece of the puzzle.
On average, probably not that much. What's the amortized cost of all testing, static analysis, and audit / code review, per "prevented potential bug"?
nothing will change until big tech can no longer rip off security researchers
advocating for this is much more ethical than donating money to Google. I'd rather have that money go my family than a multi trillion dollar company.
I'd point out that part of the reason the grey and black market pays so well is because it is that type of market. You have to pay people extra to look past their morals and a risk premium against potential reputational and legal consequences.
That said, the gap is probably not just that.
Someone could sell it on the black market, sell it to Google, or just move on with their life and not sell it.
I don't know what this is worth on the black market, maybe I'd be scammed by even trying to sell it. Maybe I don't want to be a bad person. These are all things that go into the prices
In the world where security issues are paid for entirely at market rate, it would also be very important to not use browsers by poor groups because they would be unable to pay for security reports on the market and consequently the browsers would be less secure.
Interesting idea, for sure, but I don't think it lands in a place I want to go since I neither desire stochastic payments nor desire that all browsers should be from large corporations.
What? That's not how you calculate the value of something at all.
The value is not based on the prevention, it's the cost of the cure.
How many PMs are making more than bug bounties to fetch coffee and bagels?
Their priorities are all out of order.
Why not? Capitalism requires they maximize their value. These profitable companies lay bare at the altar, so they should understand the requirements of their god.
> viewed it as insurance
Of course. Beyond the ethics, the social obligation, sleeping well at night by compensating hardworking people fairly.
“We can’t pay more or we’d have to hire more human reviewers” should never be a massive company’s line of thinking.
Total rewards given $81,933,423
in the darkweb, due to crypto, a lot. there is where the $ is, whether it's stealing crypto directly or phishing developers.
I mean, why not?
Hell no, the same level bugs at Google should be enthusiastically paid way more than from an undercapitalized startup, who actually needs the help more so. Should be orders of magnitude difference in relation to scale.
>it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth.
Honest fair-dealing should come into play at least but there are some players who have struck it so rich they can now take enough pride to pay an additional premium just because they can, and their good human nature almost compels them ethically to do way more than the minimum.
Just apparently not at Google.
If a company has achieved financial success to a degree that they are no longer worried about complete failure for the foreseeable future, then it's only a matter of generosity vs Scrooge-like behavior.
What's missing from their overall business acumen if they can't even afford to project an image of generosity yet?
If they're not actively making a serious effort to pay the maximum they can well afford for bugs that are truly serious, there is a technical term for that. Chickenshit.
Which is why I have NoScript in my Firefox and have gotten used to manually enabling javascript for select pages. Small price to pay.
Unfortunately the web is full of trivial websites that have no business running javascript. Recently wanted to read the famed post on Gates Notes. But for some reason Bill requires javascript to render text and images. Which reminded me Bill is not a person with good judgement on matters of IT and policy. Time saved.
They get emotional (usually angry) when you tell them you disable javascript- as if every site that serves any kind of content has an automatic entitlement to run arbitrary code on your computer.
That said, I think that the V8 team has done a fantastic job of securing their engine. Their heap sandbox feature is really inspiring! It's really wild that (as far as I can understand this issue) someone is able to bypass it.
(Posted from a memory safe browser - WebKit MiniBrowser compiled with Fil-C. Pretty sure this is safer than even V8 and the heap sandbox.)
It's easy to be safer, as long as performance can be sacrificed for it.
Complaining about a relatively small performance price for Fil-C in that context honestly feels like that one famous newspaper photo of a smoking pregnant woman drinking a beer with a caption saying she's wbrried about the effects of the loud construction noises next door on her unborn child.
Except even that is wrong, because at least she had a point about the construction noises, while this is more of a "refusing to eat your vegetables" kind of situation.
(I keep WASM and WebGL disabled in Firefox settings, too. Yes, I had another post ITT questioning why those things are any less secure than the JavaScript, given that they're supposed to be in a sandbox. But you know, defense in depth. It's insane that we're expected to put up with these grossly unnecessary risks all the time. Just like how it's insane that frontier models are being tested in environments that are physically capable of connecting to the Internet at large.)
We need simpler protocols and formats, especially those that are used over the internet. I want everyone to really start fighting for this.
I always use a browser that doesn't run any scripts (w3m) for both this reason and others. It hurts when I see websites that don't work without js. A bit funny though that this page is one of them so I was not able to read it.
Wikipedia is basically the most popular application of all time and it doesn't rely on javascript. People just generally don't give a shit about where their money goes.
But we do! It doesn't get much simpler than HTML/CSS/JS. It's just abused to make apps instead of web documents.
https://a.singlediv.com/
I don't get it! The way JS is typically used, it doesn't even benefit from JIT all that much. Making ajax requests, doing stuff with strings, and moving DOM elements around doesn't need every CPU clock cycle to be used as optimally as possible. It's exceedingly rare for websites to actually be doing something that needs raw performance. And SPAs will be slow no matter what.
See most of the ecosystem around React, for reference. It's idiotic that things like URL management are done in Javascript. Or form controls. I guarantee that if we stopped doing this kind of stuff, JIT wouldn't matter.
To some extent this is just saying "developers will depend upon the performance given to them", and that's true, but it's also true that as soon as things like V8 and Node appeared, JS became ubiquitous. Pandora's container, if you will.
I've never used React myself, but what I've heard about it makes me question my own sanity. So are you going to tell me that instead of just updating the DOM tree directly I'm going to apply the changes to my data, then pass the entire model to the framework, which would then diff it with the previous version to get the changes back out, it would then call my functions that return components, and it would then diff the virtual DOM to find out what changed, and only then would it update the actual page? Why the fuck would anyone ever want that? What's so hard about simply changing the innerText or inserting elements or whatever?
Oh and now Google and Apple are insisting that this is the way to do UIs in native apps as well, with Compose and SwiftUI respectively.
The way the front end developer community seems to largely encourage learning top-down isn't helping either. I'll forever remember that one guy we made a small project with. He learned React but had no clue what "send a request" and "pass a parameter" means, and I had to explain him how to use XHR.
With thousands of DOM elements on a page, the DOM becomes a bottleneck. This isn't the fault of front-end developers, and it's not really the fault of browser developers. HTML/CSS/JS is a very powerful system, but it's also complex and can cost a lot of compute. When you understand this, then the reasons for React and other front-end frameworks become easier to accept.
I haven't looked into how browsers actually do it, but my mental model for it is that if something changes, this merely sets a flag on that element or its parent that its layout is not valid any more. Then, on next vsync, all the elements that have this flag set have their layout recalculated, potentially going up the tree as necessary. The only exception is if your script tries to get any layout-related property, e.g. offsetWidth. Then, as if as part of the getter of such a property, the layout recalculation will run immediately.
That is to say, if you need to make a lot of changes to the DOM, you should make them within one JS invocation so only one layout pass happens sometime after you're done.
The principle argument in favor of React today are developer ergonomics. People don't have to manually alter individual elements anymore -- they just describe state, and React takes care of the UI change set. On top of that, you have components, etc., that are debatably more pleasant to work with, and at the least create an ecosystem advantage for users of the framework. One can certainly see the argument for something like facebook, where there are probably dozens of different things changing independently at any given time.
But that said, one really has to question whether React makes sense anymore, given LLMs. Back when the alternative was that someone had to bespoke code every UI component, it might have been worth taking the hit of having to adopt the entire React ecosystem. But now that LLMs are writing the code, there's really no argument for developer ergonomics, and suddenly, things like "rewriting URL handling in JS" are pure liabilities.
[1] Though sadly, many front-end devs don't know this.
[2] https://rossenahuh.netlify.app/React/react-concept-1---virtu...
One of my problems was that I wanted to show data in the browser. It is a convenient delivery platform, after all. However, Chrome (and Chrome in particular) has tremendous trouble displaying large pages. A 400x400 table takes a long time to render. I could solve that in JavaScript. I had to, really.
So, as practically always, the problems stem from a combination of factors, and bad programming definitely is one of them.
See most of the ecosystem around modern systems software, for reference. It's idiotic that things like memory layout and bit-level hardware management are done in C abstractions. I guarantee that if we stopped doing this kind of stuff, compiler optimizations wouldn't matter.
To some extent this is just saying "developers will depend upon the performance given to them", and that's true, but it's also true that as soon as things like compilers and standard libraries appeared, C became ubiquitous. Pandora's container, if you will.
Cute, but no, not even close to a good metaphor. The C example is abstracting away fundamental complexity in a new platform. The other is completely re-writing -- in duplicate and slightly broken -- what the platform gives you for free. There's nothing about implementing form controls or URL management in JS that is more abstract. It's just different; a downstream bad decision that branches off a long tree of other bad decisions.
The equivalent level of idiocy in a C-related metaphor would be...I dunno...if you decided that you didn't like the way that header files worked, and decided to keep the C compiler, but build an external header-file management system in Fortran [1] that calls the C compiler for you. Or even closer to the JS metaphor, you shipped a special C compiler that had an embedded interpreted language that only activated at compile time, and you then used that language to allow any user to fundamentally change the syntax of C.
(It hopefully shouldn't be lost on you that this exact approach to language features has been repeatedly tried in the javascript world, including right now, with package management. But see also: typescript, coffeescript before that, Dart, etc. Javascript is a mess, and history repeats itself with regularity about every 5 years.)
[1] ...and then you re-write that about sixty times, each time being slightly incompatible with the last, and all having different fundamental incompatibilities with C headers.
Sites are slow because with all that excess performance they do more tracking, instead of keeping the website as-is.
Because that's the only thing business managers can come up with in that situation. It's a misaligned goal of users vs businesses.
In my opinion the "user agent" behavior of browsers is long gone, because they're not acting on behalf of their users anymore. They're acting on behalf of businesses.
Uh…no?
You’re presumably talking about specific terrible prebuilt frameworks - not someone building a nice vanilla SPA.
This might oversell the agency that practicioners have.
Sandboxed zero-install delivery will outcompete anything with more frictionful installs.
It's probably not the right model for a pacemaker though.
Web/JS has been a double-edged sword for FOSS: sure, I can run a free OS, but if most of my "apps" happen to be JS that I can't practically control, then I have won a battle and lost a war.
There's also the problem of most free apps not doing a good job of providing license info and a link to source code, but this could be sidestepped by a trusted repository which provides license info itself.
[1] https://haketilo.koszko.org/
But, anyone who thinks we need JS for a functional internet is fucking retarded
In the early 2010s you had to have JS enabled for many sites to work at all. The cost:benefit equation had became entirely different.
Like cellphones, javascript became necessary if you want to use webmail, access your bank's website, or whatever.
It's the classic thing. Across every gdmf metric, excluding with "true empathy", no one *gives a fuck* until it affects them, or someone within (1-3) degrees of separatation. And having broad empathy is generally a good way to get yourself labeled/astrocized: both about as obvious "compriate" and obvious "adversary".
It's not the Bonzi-buddy and driveby-installed IE toolbars wild west of the early 00s.
Can you please provide a link to a page where a “toolbar drive-by install” occurs?
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3514
Fortunately I disabled js by default. Unfortunately, it breaks about 30% of the web. Including nvd.nist.gov, which shows a completely blank page without js enabled, even though with js it’s just a simple page with only static content.
More like 99%
I use Firefox with Noscript and I'm _totally aware_ that almost no website works without allowing it JS.
Even using Noscript it's becoming more and more exhausting every year, it's plain impossible to browse the internet without JS at all.
Only 30?
Only 30%? In 2026? With CloudFlare and Anubis et al absolutely everywhere? Not to mention SPAs
https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Vanadium/releases
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases
Only if you use Nightly wait maybe not.
> Type confusion in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 152.0.7977.82 allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code inside the sandbox via a crafted HTML page.
So it was fixed in 152.0.7977.82 (before .83), if I read that right.
"Affected products: ... Up to (excluding) 152.0.7977.82"
.82 is fixed.
Per OP link, it only affects Chrome versions prior to .82; .82 was released as stable 2 days ago. [1]
(HN title also does not match the original title, which is the CVE ID -- not particularly intuitive.)
[1] https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2026/09/stable-channel...
I have a feeling someone’s going to make an open source browser using Ladybird’s engine before Ladybird has official binaries.
Is this chained with n-days?
Those folks would not be disclosing their sandbox escape unless they were good guys.
(Posted with a memory safe WebKit, Fil-C FTW)
In the context of this vulnerability, I doubt memory safety would have made much of a difference.
This is a great reminder though, currently doing a full userspace replacement on my 3D printer and Fil-C might be just what I need for the irreplaceable C parts.
So maybe we're going to see another CVE for the sandbox escape soon?
"CISA maintains the authoritative source of vulnerabilities that have been exploited in the wild."
> allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code *inside the sandbox*
Let's say that you have a type confusion bug that (in terms of the interpreted language) allows you to use an Integer variable as an Array.
That sounds nonsensical when just considering the high-level language, but your computer is going to need something to work with when running a script. For an Integer variable it will for example store the value, and for an Array it would store a pointer to a data area (and that area then contains values).
Now, if the interpreter loses track of which type a certain variable is, then it will also not know whether to interpret the internal data as a plain value (arbitrarily chosen by the script/attacker) or a pointer to well-formed data (carefully chosen by the runtime).
As an immediate step, letting the attacker use an address of their choosing for array operations would allow them to read and write arbitrary memory that is reachable with this form of addressing.
I'm putting specific emphasis on "form of addressing" here, because the v8 authors have considered this possibility and put additional protections in place. Within the sandbox, "addresses" are limited to a size of 32 bits, and address within a dedicated 4 Gigabyte area that is specifically for interpreter data. Within that area you are not going to find a lot of critical data to affect outside operations, you'd have to find a way to escape that memory area first.
The next part is going to be a bit hazy because it's been some time since I did Chromium exploitation, and getting code execution within the sandbox from data writes is itself not an easy task.
Now, we have established that there is not a lot of terribly important data within the 4 GB area. The data managing the interpreter lives outside, and any JITed code will also live outside because it needs different access permissions. We only really get to play with Objects and their data.
Objects handling executable code are rare, but there are a few that are at least adjacent. Last time I checked, WASM was one feasible choice where you get reasonably predictable results with custom data, as it included a pointer to actual executable code that represents the WASM program.
Under the assumption that the WASM interpreter/compiler does its job correctly the full block of executable code will not be very interesting. However, any integer constant in the program will end up somewhere within the executable code, and that would give you enough controllable data to encode one or two arbitrary instructions and a relative jump to the next integer constant. To start execution at the first integer constant, we'd then just modify the Object data of the WASM program to slightly offset the entrypoint.
And that's the short form of a possible (and likely outdated) way of getting semi-arbitrary code execution within the sandbox (as we are running as a WASM program, and therefore have all the usual syscall restrictions and other security features engaged).
(Posted from memory safe WebKit; i.e. WebKit compiled with filcc and all of WebKit's dependencies compiled with filcc.)
https://fil-c.org/pizlix
Then build WebKit using do_cmake_yolo_simpler.sh in projects/webkitgtk-2.44.3
It's still pretty rough, but works more than well enough to post on HN. My regression test is to post on X. That works too
Pls file bugs if you encounter issues.
Also, fair warning, it's hella slow right now on JS-heavy websites (like X). It barely works.
But we can fix that with some effort, I think
It's damn near impossible to verify that the JIT is correct.
But it is possible to verify at runtime that the code that the JIT emitted obeys some memory safety law.
(V8's heap sandbox is an example of this; a sarcastic JIT would be an arguably stronger example of this.)
I have a new tech called SaRCAsm, which is a memory-safe assembler. So the next step is a "Sarcastic JIT" :-)
WebKit's JS engine (JavaScriptCore) is super friendly to pointer capabilities. I did not have to change much to make it use the Fil-C GC instead of its own GC and to make it use a capability per JS object.
On the other hand, Chromium's JS engine (V8) does a bunch of crazy stuff with pointer encoding, so the best you could do there is probably a single arena for the whole JS heap.
Also, JavaScriptCore has a well-supported mode that involves not only zero JIT but a fully portable C++ interpreter. Not sure V8 has that.
https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/northstar-browser/blob/m...
{
};That finally convinced me getting data using functions (accessors, getters, setters) is a good thing, even in C :) Just all that unnecesary if's are so annoing and killing performance...
"Sorry, but to enter this shop you need to take one of the used syringes from that pile some dude delivers every day and poke yourself with it."
The "all chromium versions" part of the title is also misleading, most browser CVEs do not distinguish between "untested lower bound" vs "affects all" (even though it seems like it'd be trivial to bisect).
It's because User Interaction is Required. CVSS 10 would be the case where everyone can be exploited without interaction.
Interestingly the 8.8 is more alert-worthy than the 9.8 and 10 cvss, because there is a need to be alerted of the current security risk, whereas with a cvss 2 vuln, there is nothing to be done by users, only admins.
like those news agencies have obituaries of famous old people pre-written
I bet famous people have their people write one to distribute immediately.
Also, writing those for your family sucks, easier to do it when they are alive and can tell some key stories.
Windows: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/d...
Linux: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/0e94f26e8/d...
https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8.git/+/refs/heads/mai...
However, chrome.exe itself does because it's a native application, as is the sandboxed JavaScript interpreter inside of chrome.exe.
(This is a very oversimplified explanation but I think this is the disconnect people are having)
this is besides the point, but javascript has the file system api.
anyways to your broad point, i dont think this is convincing. What's the difference between not having an api vs having an api that is disabled (e.g. the syscall exists but is filtered). Either way you are not taking the action. RCE in the sandbox is an important step in the bigger exploit chain, but not because you can express things in the traditional syscalls inside the sandbox.
But the process is still more capable than the VM. The process can talk to other processes via IPC, for example.
That's why you don't go from "javascript -> computer is taken over", instead you go from "javascript -> renderer control -> computer is taken over".
can't get a proper ios/Android RCE with just JS code exec
Well which is precisely why we have sandboxes.
To me "executing arbitrary code in the sandbox" is similar to "I don't give a flying fuck for it's what a sandbox is for".
More information is needed. As someone commented: this has to be paired with at least another exploit to make anything remotely useful.
A sandbox is a sandbox. We want to understand how "code running in a sandbox" is "actively exploited".
Even with the sandbox protection layer, the rest of the parameters are maxed out.
My read of Google's disclosure is that there is likely no known escape from the sandbox. I don't agree this would be reported this way just because "user action" like "using web browser" is required. Even if this individual CVE is correctly an 8.8 there would be a critical assessment of a known chain. The only reason there wouldn't be, would be if the other vulnerability is known to Google but has no patch yet.
To be clear, I'm not saying it doesn't. I'm saying I don't understand.
It just isn’t what free speech is.
It’s a separate thing.
Speaking more generally, don't let your ideals bias your judgment. Just because you support policy X and also view ideal Y as good that doesn't mean that X isn't detrimental to Y. It's important to be objective about these things.
(And no, I don't use it except for testing).
That said I still use Firefox for other reasons.
I simply don’t trust google, I don’t trust Mozilla either but I do trust them more than Google and you do kinda have to have a browser to function in the modern world.
If you're paranoid, disable JIT.
It can’t trick Canva into letting you use the color picker, or otherwise enable it, can it - if someone happens to know?
(What a dumb feature to be locked to the Googlesphere.)
> and on top of it you’re recommending an extension as a security measure
... Yes? Why can a browser extension not be a security measure/improvement?
Chromium is still far superior on the security front than any other browser.