Win Big Money for Hacking Google’s Chrome
The launch of the fourth annual Google Pwnium is imminent, with the search engine behemoth offering more than $2.7 million in prizes for anyone who can crack Google’s Chrome OS and/or browser.
Pwnium 4 will take place on March 12 at CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Crowdsourced hacking competitions are a good way of testing the vulnerability of systems by getting some of the smartest computer brains to work individually or collaboratively to look for flaws.
Unsurprisingly, security is a core concern for Google. Jorge Lucángeli Obes, Security Engineer at Google wrote in a blog post: “Security is a core tenet of Chromium, which is why we hold regular competitions to learn from security researchers. Contests like Pwnium help us make Chromium even more secure.”
The prize breakdown is as follows:
A grand prize of $150,000 for Chrome OS exploits that according to Google “compromise with device persistence: guest to guest with interim reboot, delivered via webpage”. In layman’s terms this is translated as a security breach that would allow a hacker to control a PC with a Chrome OS operating system, even after it reboots.
Prizes of $110,000 will be awarded to teams or individuals who can discover other major flaws in the operating system.
Bonuses
There is also enough money in the prize pot to make extra awards for those who are able to demonstrate “a particularly expressive or surprising exploit”.
According to the crowdsourcing contest rules, all details of the exploit, hack and bugs used must be handed over to Google once a successful attempt takes place. In addition, all hacks must be unknown at the time of the contest.
For a list of the rules, click here.
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