Google Chrome minted a new release to fix a trio of bugs on Monday, with exploit code already in the wild for one of them. The first two bugs don’t have much information published yet. They are an integer-overflow problem in Unicode internationalization, and a memory access issue in streams. The third issue, type confusion in V8, was also fixed quietly, but a team at Exodus Intel took the time to look at the patches and figure out what the problem was.
The actual vulnerability dives into some exotic Javascript techniques, but to put it simply, it’s possible to change a data-type without V8 noticing. This allows malicious code to write into the header area of the attacked variable. The stack, now corrupted, can be manipulated to the point of arbitrary code execution. The researchers make the point that even with Google’s fast-paced release schedule, a determined attacker could have several days of virtual zero-day exploitation of a bug mined from code changes. Story via The Register.
The Chrome Problem that Wasn’t
A second Chrome story came across my desk this week: Chrome 80 introduces a new feature, ScrollToTextFragment. This useful new feature allows you to embed a string of text in a URL, and when loading that address, Chrome will scroll the page to make that text visible. For certain use cases, this is an invaluable feature. Need to highlight a specific bit of text in a big document online?
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