Researcher Claims To Have Chrome Zero-Day, Google Says "Prove It" 106
chicksdaddy writes "Google's been known to pay $60,000 for information on remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in its Chrome web browser. So, when a researcher says that he has one, but isn't interested in selling it, eyebrows get raised. And that's just what's happening this week, with Google saying it will wait and see what Georgian researcher Ucha Gobejishvili has up his sleeve in a presentation on Saturday at the Malcon conference in New Delhi. Gobejishvili has claimed that he will demonstrate a remotely exploitable hole in the Chrome web browser at Malcon. He described the security hole in Chrome as a 'critical vulnerability' in a Chrome DLL. 'It has silent and automatically (sp) download function and it works on all Windows systems,' he told Security Ledger. However, more than a few questions hang over Gobejishvili's talk. The researcher said he discovered the hole in July, but hasn't bothered to contact Google. He will demonstrate the exploit at MalCon, and have a 'general discussion' about it, but won't release source code for it. 'I know this is a very dangerous issue that's why I am not publishing more details about this vulnerability,' he wrote. Google said that, with no information on the hole, it can only wait to hear the researcher's Malcon presentation before it can assess the threat to Chrome users."
This researcher has a poor track record (Score:5, Informative)
This security researcher has a track record of not understanding even basic security concepts.
Basic misunderstanding of "memory corruption" vs. an "out of memory" condition: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=108651
Basic misunderstanding of web security and the capabilities of Javascript: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=148636
This does not preclude the case where he's stumbled across something real, but it seems highly unlikely.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Certainly has a legitimate track record (Score:5, Informative)
I seriously doubt any of the big zero-day sellers (or buyers for that matter) would be interested in an "exploit" where you use java script to change the *status bar* (Not address bar) to spoof what URL a link actually goes to.
Yes, that really is what this person considers an exploit, and he has never discovered nor shown he understands anything more complex than that :P
Re:Certainly has a legitimate track record (Score:5, Informative)
LMAO
The very first video where he purportedly shows an Office 2010 0-day vulnerability ("it has silent and automatically download function"), I noticed he right clicked the desktop and clicked pressed "refresh"...
He then moves on to show that he really is running Office 2010, and then he opens a link, not a word file, which opens MS Word and then opens a local, not silently downloaded, executable: Putty. He finishes by typing "1337" in the connectbox of Putty.
There are unthinkably many scenarios that lead to this behavior, but this dude having been able to find an actual 0-day vulnerability in any software is not one of them.