That's pretty bad! I wonder what kind of bounty went to the researcher.
I'd be surprised if it's above 20K$.
Bug bounties rewards are usually criminally low; doubly so when you consider the efforts usually involved in not only finding serious vulns, but demonstrating a reliable way to exploit them.
Offer $25K and it is "How dare a trillion dollar company pay so little?"
Offer $250K and it is "Hmm. Exception! Must be marketing!"
What precisely is an acceptable number?
It seems like these vulnerabilities will always be more valuable to people who can guarantee that their use will generate a return than to people who will use them to prevent a theoretical loss.
Beyond that, selling zero-days is a seller's market where sellers can set prices and court many buyers, but bug bounties are a buyer's market where there is only one buyer and pricing is opaque and dictated by the buyer.
So why would anyone ever take a bounty instead of selling on the black market? Risk! You might get arrested or scammed selling an exploit on the black market, black market buyers know that, so they price it in to offers.
Most* valuable exploits can be sold on the gray market - not via some bootleg forum with cryptocurrency scammers or in a shadowy back alley for a briefcase full of cash, but for a simple, taxed, legal consulting fee to a forensics or spyware vendor or a government agency in a vendor shaped trenchcoat, just like any other software consulting income.
The risk isn't arrest or scam, it's investment and time-value risk. Getting a bug bounty only requires (generally) that a bug can pass for real; get a crash dump with your magic value in a good looking place, submit, and you're done.
Selling an exploit chain on the gray market generally requires that the exploit chain be reliable, useful, and difficult to detect. This is orders of magnitude more difficult and is extremely high-risk work not because of some "shady" reason, but because there's a nonzero chance that the bug doesn't actually become useful or the vendor patches it before payout.
The things you see people make $500k for on the gray market and the things you see people make $20k for in a bounty program are completely different deliverables even if the root cause / CVE turns out to be the same.
*: For some definition of most, obviously there is an extant "true" crappy cryptocurrency forum black market for exploits but it's not very lucrative or high-skill compared to the "gray market;" these places are a dumping ground for exploits which are useful only for crime and/or for people who have difficulty doing even mildly legitimate business (widely sanctioned, off the grid due to personal history, etc etc.)
I see that someone linked an old tptacek comment about this topic which per the usual explains things more eloquently, so I'll link it again here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43025038
I like to believe there are also ethics involved in most cases
Even revealing enough details, but not everything, about the flaw to convince a potential buyer would be detrimental to the seller, as the level of details required to convince would likely massively simplify the work of the buyer should they decide to try and find the flaw themselves instead of buying. And I imagine much of those potential buyers would be state actors or organized criminal groups, both of which do have researchers in house.
The way this trust issue is (mostly) solved in drugs DNM is through the platform itself acting as a escrow agent; but I suspect such a thing would not work as well with selling vulnerabilities, because the volume is much lower, for one thing (preventing a high enough volume for reputation building); the financial amounts generally higher, for another.
The real money to be made as a criminal alternative, I think, would be to exploit the flaw yourself on real life targets. For example to drop ransomware payloads; these days ransomware groups even offer franchises - they'll take, say, 15% of the ransom cut and provide assistance with laundering/exploiting the target/etc; and claim your infection in the name of their group.
Say you're in the US. I'm sure there are some CIA teams or whatever making use of Chromium exploits "off the record", but for any official business the government would just put pressure on Google directly to get what they want. So any project making use of your zero-day would be so secret that it'd be virtually impossible for you to even get in contact with anybody interested to buy it. Sure they might not try to "screw you", but it's sort of like going to the CIA and saying, "Hey would you be interested in buying this cache of illegal guns? Perhaps you could use it to arm Cuban rebels". What do you think they would respond to that?
Is conning a seller really worth it for a potential buyer? Details will help an expert find the flaw, but it still takes lots of work, and there is the risk of not finding it (and the seller will be careful next time).
> And I imagine much of those potential buyers would be state actors or organized criminal groups, both of which do have researchers in house.
They also have the money to just buy an exploit.
> The real money to be made as a criminal alternative, I think, would be to exploit the flaw yourself on real life targets. For example to drop ransomware payloads; these days ransomware groups even offer franchises - they'll take, say, 15% of the ransom cut and provide assistance with laundering/exploiting the target/etc; and claim your infection in the name of their group.
I'd imagine the skills needed to get paid from ransomware victims without getting caught to be very different from the skills needed to find a vulnerability.
Issue 2: Selling to governments generally means selling to a Creepy-Spooky Agency. Sadly, creeps & spooks can "get ideas" about their $500k also buying them rights to your future work.
Is this a requirement for most bug bounty programs? Particularly the “reliable” bit?
It’s why Firefox and Safari as so important despite HN’a wish they’d go away.
Sadly, mozilla is now an adtech company (https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-...) and by default firefox now collects your data to sell to advertisers. We can expect less and less privacy for firefox users as Mozilla is now fully committed to trying to profit from the sale of firefox users personal data to advertisers.
Brave is an example of a company doing some of the same things, but actually succeeding it appears. They have some kind of VPN thing, but also have Tor tabs for some other use cases.
They have some kind of integration with crypto wallets I have used a few times, but I'm sure Firefox has a reason they can't do that or would mess it up.
You can only watch Mozilla make so many mistakes while you suffer a worse Internet experience. The sad part is that we are paying the price now. All of the companies that can benefit from the Chrome lock in are doing so. The web extensions are neutered - and more is coming - and the reasons are exactly what you would expect: more ads and weird user hostile features like "you must keep this window in the foreground" that attempt to extract a "premium" experience from basic usage.
Mozilla failed and now the best we have is Brave. Soon the fingerprinting will be good enough Firefox will be akin to running a Tor browser with a CAPTCHA verification can for every page load.
Selling preferential search access is legally precarious due to FTC's lawsuit against Mozilla.
They could start with the one they've refused for ages even though many have asked for it. Let people directly donate to fund the development of firefox (as opposed to just giving mozilla money to funnel into any number of their other projects). They could even make money selling merch if they didn't tank the brand. Firefox could have a very nice niche to fill as a privacy focused browser for power users who desire customization and security, but sadly they don't seem interested in being that. For whatever reason they'd rather spend a fortune buying adtech from facebook employees and be a chrome clone that pushes ads and sells user data, and that isn't going to inspire support from users.
That said, I'm not convinced that every open source project needs to be profit generating. Many projects are hugely successful without resorting to ads. What makes it possible for VLC or even Arch Linux to thrive without advertising that couldn't work just as well for firefox? The solution is certainly not to turn Firefox into a project that their users no longer want to support or use at all, but that seems to be where they are headed by selling out their userbase.
Mozilla - wrongly - believes that the majority of FF users believe in Mozilla's hobby projects rather than that they care about their browser.
That's why - as far as I know - to this day it is impossible to directly fund Firefox. They'd rather take money from google than to be focusing on the one thing that matters.
Although I must admit to the guilty pleasure of gleefully using Chromium-only features in internal apps where users are guaranteed to run Edge.
/s
I understand the meme very well. What made the Poland meme, was precisely that Polands membership in the coaltion was irrelevant to fit the description of "grand coalition".
We are currently in a thread, where a major application has a heap corruption error in its CSS parser, and it's not even rare for such errors to occur. This doesn't seem true.
>But automated package managers etc can bring in code under the covers, and you end up with something you didn't ask for.
Last year there was a backdoor inserted into xz that was only caught because someone thought their CPU usage a little too high. I don't think the whole "C is safer because people don't use dependencies" is actually sound.
The last 40-50 years have conclusively shown us that relying on the programmer to be disciplined, yourself included, does not work.
It's 'just a compiler' (ok, a bit more than that). I don't need to use a particular IDE, a particular build system, a particular package manager or even a particular repository.
That is not to throw shade on those other languages, each to their own, but I just like my tools to stay in their lane.
Just like I have a drawer full of different hammers rather than one hammer with 12 different heads, a screwdriver, a hardware store and a drill attachment. I wouldn't know what to do with it.
https://github.com/casey/just/blob/master/Cargo.toml
That’s just asking for trouble down the line.
They’ll stick with a stable version that has the features they need until they have a good reason to move. That version will be one they’ve decided to ship themselves, or it’ll be provided by someone like Debian or Red Hat.
Most corporations are already using the likes of Nexus or JFrog Artifactory, regardless of the programming language.
No, people routinely write Rust with no third-party dependencies, and yet people do not routinely write C code that is memory-safe. Your threat model needs re-evaluating. Also keep in mind that the most common dependencies (rand, serde, regex, etc) are literally provided by the Rust project itself, and are no more susceptible to supply chain attacks than the compiler.
That being said as many above have pointed out you can choose not to bring in dependencies. The Chrome team already does this with the font parser library they limit dependencies to 1 or 2 trusted ones with little to no transitive dependencies. Let's not pretend C / C++ is immune to this we had the xz vuln not too long ago. C / C++ has the benefit of the culture not using as many dependencies but this is still a problem that exists. With the increase of code in the world due to ai this is a problem we're going to need to fix sooner rather than later.
I don't think the supply chain should be a blocker for using rust especially when once of the best C++ teams in the world with good funding struggles to always write perfect code. The chrome team has shown precedent for moving to rust safely and avoiding dependency hell, they'll just need to do it again.
They have hundreds of engineers many of which are very gifted, hell they can write their own dependencies!
The problem exists in C/C++ too, but the depth of dependencies are much smaller though, making the attack surface smaller, and damage gets spread to fewer products.
If I personally had to choose between a product written in C without dependencies to run on openbsd versus the same product written in rust with a few dependencies I would probably choose the C implementation. Even if there is a memory bug, if the underlying system is right they are extremely difficult/expensive to exploit. Abusing a supply chain on the other hand is very easy
It's a culture problem and I still have hope we can change that. My big hope is that as more big players get into it, windows, linux, android, chome, we'll get high quality stand alone packages. Many of these products have to reach certain standards. We saw this recently with JPEGXL. It got accepted into chromium and they've been diligent as to not bring in additional external dependencies.
Projects like sudo-rs take the same approach. As always good engineers will make good code as more of a niche for rust gets carved out I belive we'll see an ecosystem more like c / cpp and less like nodejs (of course this is just my sepeculation)
Yes but so do supply chain attacks. I mean we both know there's never a way to be absolutely secure and it's all just about probability. The question is how to determine what product may have better chances. All I am saying is that I personally prioritize fewer dependencies over memory safety.
I like your optimism, which I unfortunately struggle to share. I believe the quality of code will go down, there will be a lot of vibe code, and in general inexperienced people who don't put in the cognitive effort to pay attention to it. As software gets cheaper with AI, it will also become increasingly difficult to find the good things in a sea of slop. A good time for all the security engineers though ;)
If anything, what are you doing about supply chain for the existing code base? How is cargo worse here when cargo-vet exists and is actively maintained by Google, Mozilla, and others?
That said, `cargo-vet` is easily the best tool for mitigating this that I am aware of and it exists for Rust and is actively maintained by Google, Mozilla, and many others. I think it's fine to say "Rust encourages using more dependencies" but it has to be acknowledged that Rust also brings with it the best in class tool for supply chain security.
Could it be better? Absolutely. God yes. Why is cargo giving access to `~/.ssh/` for every `build.sh`? Why do package managers not make any effort to sandbox? But that's life today.
Unfortunately, "seen in the wild" likely means that they _also_ had a sandbox escape, which likely isn't revealed publicly because it's not a vulnerability in properly running execution (i.e., if the heap were not already corrupted, no vulnerability exists).
Given the staggering importance of the projects they should really have a full-time, well-staffed, well-funded, dedicated team combing through every line, hunting these things down, and fixing them before they have a chance to be used. It'd be a better use of resources than smart fridge integration or whatever other bells and whistles Google has most recently decided to tack onto Chrome.
Saying "Markdown has a CVE" would sound equally off. I'm aware that its not actually CSS having the vulnerability but when simplified that's what it sounds like.
This is the "impact" section on https://github.com/huseyinstif/CVE-2026-2441-PoC:
Arbitrary code execution within the renderer process sandbox Information disclosure — leak V8 heap pointers (ASLR bypass), read renderer memory contents Credential theft — read document.cookie, localStorage, sessionStorage, form input values Session hijacking — steal session tokens, exfiltrate via fetch() / WebSocket / sendBeacon() DOM manipulation — inject phishing forms, modify page content Keylogging — capture all keystrokes via addEventListener('keydown')
I get that css has changed a lot over the years with variables, scopes and adopting things from less/sass/coffee, but people use no-script for the reason because javascript is risky, but what if css can be just as risky... time to also have no-style?
Honestly, pretty excited for the full report since it's either stupid as hell or a multi-step attack chain.
No, we don't. All of the ones we have are heavily leveraged in Chromium or were outright developed at Google for similar projects. 10s of billions are spent to try to get Chromium to not have these vulnerabilities, using those tools. And here we are.
I'll elaborate a bit. Things like sanitizers largely rely on test coverage. Google spends a lot of money on things like fuzzing, but coverage is still a critical requirement. For a massive codebase, gettign proper coverage is obviously really tricky. We'll have to learn more about this vulnerability but you can see how even just that limitation alone is sufficient to explain gaps.
And not in a trivial “this line is traversed” way, you need to actually trigger the error condition at runtime for a sanitizer to see anything. Which is why I always shake my head at claims that go has “amazing thread safety” because it has the race detector (aka tsan). That’s the opposite of thread safety. It is, if anything, an admission to a lack of it.
> 10s of billions are spent to try to get Chromium to not have these vulnerabilities, using those tools. And here we are.
Shouldn't pages run in isolated and sandboxed processes anyway? If that exploit gets you anywhere it would be a failure of multiple layers.
However if you have arbitrary code execution then you can groom the heap with malloc/new to create the layout for a heap overflow->ret2libc or something similar
also this seems chromium only so it doesnt impact firefox ?
honestly curious. do you think "based on chrome" means they forked the engine and not just "applied some UI skin"?
The term has long watered-down to mean any vulnerability (since it was always a zero-day at some point before the patch release, I guess is those people's logic? idk). Fear inflation and shoehorning seems to happen to any type of scary/scarier/scariest attack term. Might be easiest not to put too much thought into media headlines containing 0day, hacker, crypto, AI, etc. Recently saw non-R RCEs and supply chain attacks not being about anyone's supply chain copied happily onto HN
Edit: fwiw, I'm not the downvoter
In a security context, it has come to mean days since a mitigation was released. Prior to disclosure or mitigation, all vulnerabilities are "0-day", which may be for weeks, months, or years.
It's not really an inflation of the term, just a shifting of context. "Days since software was released" -> "Days since a mitigation for a given vulnerability was released".
This seems logical since by etymology of zeroday it should apply to the release (=disclosure) of a vuln.