Google pays researcher $60K for Chrome hack

10.10.2012
Google today awarded $60,000 to a security researcher who cracked Chrome at the search firm's second "Pwnium" hacking contest.

The researcher, a teenager who goes by the nickname "Pinkie Pie," was a returning winner: Last March, he was for hacking the Chrome browser at Google's inaugural challenge.

Pwnium 2 took place at the Hack In The Box security conference this week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Google made news two months ago when it announced the follow-up contest, saying then that it would put as much as $2 million on the line.

Pinkie Pie's $60,000 was the only reward handed out at Pwnium 2.

"This [exploit] relied on a WebKit Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) compromise to exploit the renderer process and a second bug in the IPC layer to escape the Chrome sandbox," Chris Evans, a Chrome software engineer, said in a Wednesday post to the . "Since this exploit depends entirely on bugs within Chrome to achieve code execution, it qualifies for our highest award level."

IPC stands for "inter-process communication," and is the technology used in Chrome to allow multiple active browser processes to "talk" to each other.