Google has donated $20,000 to a yearly hacking competition to be awarded to the first researcher able to crack its Chrome browser. The Mountain View, Calif. company's move marks the first time a browser developer has contributed money to the contest. The Pwn2Own competition is in its fifth year and is held at the CanSecWest security conference. Participants are tasked with cracking a variety of other browsers too (Apple's Safari, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and Mozilla's Firefox) on computers supplied by the contest creators running Windows 7. Those that perform a successful crack win the computer it was done on as well as a $15,000 cash prize. Cracking Chrome will be hard. The browser uses what is called a "sandbox," which isolates system processes. In order for a crack to be successful, first the sandbox must be cracked, and then the exploit code itself executed. Google is offering a CR-48 netbook as a prize itself in addition to the cash award. The...
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