Google has announced a bug-bounty program that will pay resrchers $500 for ch vulnerability they report in the Chrome browser and its underlying open-source .
In a post to the Chromium project's blog , Chris Evans, who works on the Chrome security tm, said the base bounty would be $500, but that "particularly severe or particularly clever" bugs would rp rewards of $1,337 ch.
The latter amount is a reference to "leet," a kind of geek-spk used by some resrchers; there, "leet" is rendered as "1337."
New vulnerabilities in Chrome, Chromium -- the open-source project that Google uses to craft Chrome -- and plug-ins that ship with Chrome, such as Google Grs, are eligible for bounties, said Evans. Bugs that are ranked "high" or "critical" in Chrome's rating system get preference, he added, but others may be considered.
"We are hoping that ... this program will encourage new individuals to participate in Chromium security," said Evans. "The more people involved in scrutinizing Chromium's and behavior, the more secure our millions of users will be."
"Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox...those browsers have been out there for a long time," said Pedram Amini, manager of the security resrch tm at 3com's Austin, Tex.-based TippingPoint, which operates Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), one of the two best-known bug-bounty programs. "But Chrome, and now Chrome OS, need resrchers. Google needs people to put eyes on the target."
Google's new bounty program isn't the first from a software vendor looking for help rooting out vulnerabilities in its own , but it's the largest company to step forward, Amini said. , for example, has traditionally dismissed any calls that it pay for vulnerabilities. "This will be beneficial to Google," Amini added. "There are actually very few vendors who play in the bounty market, but Google doing it is definitely interesting."
Both Amini and Google's Evans cited Mozilla's similar program as the first notable vendor-sponsored bounty. Mozilla kicked off a $500-per-vulnerability bounty in August 2004 that it is still in operation. The Mozilla program pays for bugs in the used to crte Firefox, Thunderbird and other open-source appliions.
Mozilla declined to comment on Google's decision to pay bounties, or answer questions about the current status of its own bug bounty program.
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