Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions
nvd.nist.gov
nvd.nist.gov
According to the Chrome release page (https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2026/09/stable-channel...), Google paid a researcher $1000 for ethically reporting this.
The CVE associated with it (CVE-2026-85046) is already being exploited in the wild. If we put our thinking caps on, how much do you think this vulnerability is actually worth? How much do you think an organization like Google would spend on, for example, AI tokens or compute to detect this internally before it was found and exploited in the wild?
Ethical disclosure is a complicated topic, because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment. But at the same time, if someone submits a critical issue like this, it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth. Why should a researcher be effectively penalized for responsibly telling a vendor instead of selling the bug to a "research firm" or three-letter agency?
It's one thing if you're an open source project maintainer just trying to put something out to the community. The math is a lot different if you're Google.
Remember that you can sell the same vulnerability to multiple people: it's software you can copy.
$1k is so dumb and the fact we’re discussing auctions is proof (hello, Sundar, what you doing over there?).
Guess this will change after the next e.g. nationwide hospital ransomware by a hacker who publicly laments bounty rates, if the news cycle accommodates the story long enough.
Negotiating with terrorists or black mailers is a bad idea.
The legitimate threat the researcher has is to disclose to the general public. (And to disclose the next bug to the general public, if there's no good payment.)
Isn't that a good thing?
> However it is now clear that all bugs that can be found will be found. So this makes a ton of sense.
If Google can find all the bugs nowadays, presumably with AI, why still pay a bug bounty? At least by this logic, bug bounties make less sense now.
Even a resume item.
* They pay for vulnerabilities without reliable exploits (more for vulnerabilities that are demonstrably reliable).
* They don't require you to actually build a reliable exploit chain.
* They pay up front, not in tranches.
* They work with essentially all comers, unlike the grey market, where you're generally subcontracting to sell your first few.
Sound very interesting!
There's also a couple of Darknet Diaries episodes with similar interviews.
... than Google?
> Selling to Google though you aren't chancing jail time.
Why would you go to jail for selling a vulnerability? It's free speech.
Not so much for taking money from someone who the buyer should know has no reason to be interested in buying the information. And either you know who your counterparty is, in which case you know that they are using it nefariously, or you don't know who your counterparty is, in which case you know that they are using it nefariously. Any court and any jury should see straight through this.
Similarly if you figure out how to get the ATM down the street to give you free money, and you "accurately describe the bug" to people who pay you, and they use it to steal money from the ATM, expect to be charged for participating in, and in fact being an instrumental enabler of their crime. Because it is beyond all reasonable doubt that you could've believed they could have been interested enough to pay you for any other reason.
Since it's all so legal and risk-free, you'd think selling an exploit for a million bucks would be quite the feather in their cap!
It may also be helpful to visualize being interviewed by the FBI and being asked "Did you sell this exploit? To whom? How much did you receive? For what purpose did you think it would be used?". And to remember they already know the answers to these questions, and lying to the FBI is also a crime.
There's no way money is the motivator.
But they weren't security issues necessarily. I never thought about it, fixing a huge performance issue is big. A security fix that gets caught early makes no noise so you just don't know how important it would have been. We also once had a really terrible bug that lead to lots of customers getting effectively attacked.
Potentially creates a misaligned incentive to intentionally hide bugs in the code you write so that later you can fix it and get the bounty.
Now exploiting them? Yes that's a crime.
"Safety" is also a relative thing, when the world is safer for one party, it is usually worse for another.
99.999% of people will agree that reducing software vulnerabilities is desirable if they're able to understand the question, including the bad actors themselves a lot of the times.
The situations like bad state actors are already not bound by laws, and things like keeping activism legal are better fought for through other ways
"Making money from bugs" is not solely a black-market activity. There are plenty of grey and even white hat activities in this market.
Yeah let's see how this plays out, paying people less than their time is worth for RCEs.
Aka security research.
It's one thing to hold something for ransom ("give me $5M or I release the 0day"). It's another to sell a valuable piece of information ("give me $5M if you want the 0day"). As long as you're only offering the bug to the company who would be impacted by its release, there's nothing unethical about asking for payment.
Maybe you think that, ethically, all bugs should be reported, regardless of payment, because it prevents harm. Well a lot of things prevent harm that we don't all take it upon ourselves to do voluntarily. Should everyone do all safety-related work for free? If we don't want to do it for free, should we not do safety work at all?
If the company really wanted it safe, and they can't make it safe themselves, they can pay someone else to make it safe. If they aren't willing to do that, then nobody is obligated to do free work for them, because we don't require anyone else to do safety-critical work for free. Let's not forget, this isn't a scrappy startup struggling for a seed round, this is one of the world's largest corporations with billions of dollars in cash. If they want your labor, make them pay for it.
Thanks for putting it like that, it changed my opinion on the subject.
If it's normal to expect people to be compensated for other security work, it implies it should also be normal to compensate security researches.
No it’s not lol
If old systems had no bugs/issues, companies could do without the maintenance burden altogether (which includes even systems not being evolved/extended).
# assumed to be $0.5mil USD or greater
A := What quantity of salaries-and-benefits and AI-dollars does Google spend on zero-day research?
# assumed to be greater than zero
B := How many full sandbox RCEs are they *hoping* to discover per year with that budget?
# $/RCE budgeted spend
C := A ÷ B
# $/bounty
D := $1000 USD
# % discount per bounty relative to in-house spend
E := (C - D) / C
So, the most likely case is that they're greedy and miserly, and hope we don't do the math. However I recognize that there are judgment calls to be made here. Either their internal spending finds hundreds of RCEs per year, or they're significantly discounting bounty payments versus their actual worth, or they're negligent in budgeting for RCE discovery at all, or they assign zero value to the security of the Chromium platform underpinning Edge, Electron, et al. All of these are bad in different ways; one hopes a competent tech reporter actually pursues this line of questioning with them!
I generally agree, but a 3rd explanation is they figure that too generous a bounty will flood them with reports of minor issues making major ones harder to see (and costing time and money to verify that could be spent looking for security issues).
Like look at CVEs curl dealt with at one point that were just completely bogus and given huge severity ratings to start with.
But honestly if you’re the one proposing a “simple solution” maybe do some research yourself.
It's an off the cuff idea on a nerd forum. Relax buddy.
> viewed it as insurance
Of course. Beyond the ethics, the social obligation, sleeping well at night by compensating hardworking people fairly.
“We can’t pay more or we’d have to hire more human reviewers” should never be a massive company’s line of thinking.
Total rewards given $81,933,423
https://bughunters.google.com/about/rules/chrome-friends/chr...
On average, probably not that much. What's the amortized cost of all testing, static analysis, and audit / code review, per "prevented potential bug"?
nothing will change until big tech can no longer rip off security researchers
advocating for this is much more ethical than donating money to Google. I'd rather have that money go my family than a multi trillion dollar company.
of course it could be a colleague or someone with access to such tools
from what I remember, they also don't pay it all out at once but rather over time where the payments stop if the bug gets patched.
I don't understand why you're being so cocky here? this is how many 0 click exploits are sourced
Why not? Capitalism requires they maximize their value. These profitable companies lay bare at the altar, so they should understand the requirements of their god.
in the darkweb, due to crypto, a lot. there is where the $ is, whether it's stealing crypto directly or phishing developers.
Having just a Sandbox RCE is neat, I've got some on my laptop currently, but it's just a piece of the puzzle.
In the world where security issues are paid for entirely at market rate, it would also be very important to not use browsers by poor groups because they would be unable to pay for security reports on the market and consequently the browsers would be less secure.
Interesting idea, for sure, but I don't think it lands in a place I want to go since I neither desire stochastic payments nor desire that all browsers should be from large corporations.
Further: a vulnerability is probably not worth that much either, even if it's a hypercapable vulnerability, because the grey market buys full enablement kits, not vulnerability information. People making 6 figures on vulnerabilities are selling fully enabled full chain exploit systems, not just intelligence about a sandbox escape.
Bug bounties are as much a way of attracting talent to even try to exploit your system as they are about the exploits themselves. If you lowball the bounties the talent goes elsewhere.
We shouldn't look to the black market as cost discovery for these vulnerabilities, most non-criminal researchers are not putting up an ask order and letting the black market compete with Google.
We absolutely should. One of the points of bug bounties is to discourage people from selling to the black market.
A hardline bargaining position with Google would be more like "pay me what I want, or else I'll give it to all takers on the black market for maximum damage". That would be unethical and probably illegal to boot but it's a better definition of value than "1$ greater than max bid".
The value of something is dictated by what _the market_ offers, and just because Google throws a lowball price because _they_ don't value it doesn't necessarily mean that the value of the exploit itself is as low as they dictate.
There will always be someone who would screw Google just for the love of the game, and if they got a better price from elsewhere, I don't see why _morality_ would really play that big of a role. It all comes down to incentives, and if Google doesn't incentivize doing the good thing enough, then someone _will_ incentivize them to do the bad thing just a bit more.
Markets are fundamental things and exist regardless of any kind of moral "should". Otherwise we wouldn't have people buying hard drugs or trafficing women.
Google should, as a rational actor, pay out better for legitimate vulnerabilities that pose actual risk to them to avoid such a situation.
My beef here is that morality and ethics are only assigned to the researchers.
Google is only paying for the vulnerability; the exploit market is also paying for your mortal soul.
‘Officer, you can’t arrest me for carrying a gold bar!’
‘I can if you are carrying it out of the Federal Reserve vault without permission’
Similarly:
‘Surely selling someone the knowledge that a piece of software can be hacked isn’t illegal?’
‘It is if you know or suspect that that person’s intention is to use that knowledge to commit crimes’
This would make you a ‘coconspirator’ or possibly an ‘accessory before the fact’ in any crimes they committed.
I had a friend that worked in the space. He lived an exciting life; I hope he's still alive..
I'd point out that part of the reason the grey and black market pays so well is because it is that type of market. You have to pay people extra to look past their morals and a risk premium against potential reputational and legal consequences.
That said, the gap is probably not just that.
Someone could sell it on the black market, sell it to Google, or just move on with their life and not sell it.
I don't know what this is worth on the black market, maybe I'd be scammed by even trying to sell it. Maybe I don't want to be a bad person. These are all things that go into the prices
How many PMs are making more than bug bounties to fetch coffee and bagels?
Their priorities are all out of order.
Hell no, the same level bugs at Google should be enthusiastically paid way more than from an undercapitalized startup, who actually needs the help more so. Should be orders of magnitude difference in relation to scale.
>it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth.
Honest fair-dealing should come into play at least but there are some players who have struck it so rich they can now take enough pride to pay an additional premium just because they can, and their good human nature almost compels them ethically to do way more than the minimum.
Just apparently not at Google.
If a company has achieved financial success to a degree that they are no longer worried about complete failure for the foreseeable future, then it's only a matter of generosity vs Scrooge-like behavior.
What's missing from their overall business acumen if they can't even afford to project an image of generosity yet?
If they're not actively making a serious effort to pay the maximum they can well afford for bugs that are truly serious, there is a technical term for that. Chickenshit.
It's insulting how poorly incentivised white hats are, just look at how much North Korea is raking in with their cyber shenanigans - current estimates put it at around $6.75 billion to date (over the past 10 years or so).
I mean, why not?
> allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code *inside the sandbox*
A bug in V8 leads to code execution in Chrome's web page process. It does not lead to execution in general. For that you need other exploits that escape the web page process. Those are not detailed here. This CVE is not a big deal. You're responding the poster's title, not the actual CVE
https://serotav.github.io/Writeups/v8/when-sorting-leads-to-...
that's why bugs in the webpage process pay out very little. Without a worse 2nd bug, they are less serious. Bugs that let you RCE outside the webpage process pay much higher.
Which means that they have zero concern from this incident about reputational damage to themselves or their browser. That's pretty good circumstantial evidence of a monopolistic practice, when you can safely assume that there's effectively no difference to your bottom line if your software is hacked.
This should have been done a long time ago.
Firefox, and the browser market would be much more healthy. Btw, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, now even Twitter/SpaceX and all of these should have been forced the same way. And of course not just in this field, but all of them, like oil companies. They can pivot, of course, with some grace period, but that would mean giving up something at the end.
And if we are there, we can abolish most of trade secrecy too, which exists only to keep up the status quo while hindering progress.
If people want a better internet, they can start fostering one, rather than endlessly complain that someone else should be fostering it for them.
There will probably be upwards of 1000 people who read this comment that have used Google services for 15+ years, never loaded a single ad, and complain about Google ruining the internet. Please, pick-up a mirror. Nobody wants to build a competitor to serve your cheap ass
This comment in general, not aimed at you.
There are hundreds of us, hundreds.
Search Engine have chicken and egg problem, you can only have a good search if enough people use it to tune the ranking and see enough search spam cases.
“Just compete with a monopoly on their own field with one hand tied behind”
They don't need to do anything adversarial, the greed driven mindset of the internet (ads suck, everything should be free) staves off any real competition.
It's not nothing, but it's probably around 20%.
Also as others stated. I pay for everything, if they give me the opportunity to pay them for ad free versions. I don't see ads on my Android, and I don't use a general ad blocker on it (except my browser, but I rarely visit sites which would contain ads, and basically all of them from Hacker News). I don't use free search, email, newspapers, I pay for YouTube, and I would pay for Facebook if I would use it. I don't even use Hacker News freely, because I paid for the app which I use to not see ads, and have more features. Heck, I pay even for my torrent, because I support them.
You're in the wrong neighborhood with this sentiment. But yes, the general populace is not like this.
Hell the top story right now is about a tool for backdooring twitter...
Microsoft was sued by the USDOJ in 1998 precisely for this, that it was leveraging the pre-installation of Windows to force Internet Explorer to be the default browser for PC consumers. That that was bad for both security and for the web seems pretty obvious in retrospect, when you think about the trajectory of IE.
Apple's insistent blocking of non-webkit web engines, including V8, on its own hardware/iOS is an even more egregious and dangerous phenomenon.
Browser security and browsers themselves would be vastly improved if they weren't a monopoly of the two mobile OS makers.
It’s natural to feel cognitive dissonance because the value to the vendor is so disproportionate to the potential harm to users, but the incentive structure is what it is.
A vulnerability which lets an attacker harm the vendor has much higher direct financial value.
What? That's not how you calculate the value of something at all.
The value is not based on the prevention, it's the cost of the cure.
why? google removed don't be evil off their charter a long time ago. why shouldn't security researchers also seek to maximize profits?
Why not?
"Hey, I found a cvss 8.8 bug in chrome that allows arbitrary code execution when loading my http url. For X USD I can send a report along, and for Y USD I can send a commit with the fix."
Sounds like a basic contract to me
What I do think is ethically dubious is:
"Hey I found this bug and I will MAKE IT PUBLIC WITHIN 90 DAYS SO LOOK AT IT"
I know it's a convention from 'security researchers', but I think the first approach is more ethical than the latter.
- for developers: don't report, it's not worth it
- for users: Google does not care about security as it doesn't pay for reporting (enough).
The problem here is that the browser failed to correctly implement those rules. If the chromium team cannot do that, what makes you think they can implement any other kind of "benign code" verification with zero bugs?
You can prove that your code terminates (or rather responds to events in a finite time, even if the event loop itself runs forever.) Or you can even prove that your code reacts quickly, ie within some time limit. You can also prove memory limits.
> The problem here is that the browser failed to correctly implement those rules. If the chromium team cannot do that, what makes you think they can implement any other kind of "benign code" verification with zero bugs?
Defense in depth. And you can have competing implementations relatively easily for this, and another way to find and report bugs. Especially if the verifier is open source.
The verifier itself can be pretty simple: it's the prover that's complicated and needs smarts, but that's being run on the author's computer, not in the user's browser.
As a practical counterexample, the Linux kernel has a verifier for eBPF code that is loaded by untrusted users. That is a much more constrained environment than JS, but they still constantly have verifier bugs. It's so bad that distros almost universally distrust the verifier and instead set things up s.t. only root can load any eBPF code.
Like cellphones, javascript became necessary if you want to use webmail, access your bank's website, or whatever.
It's the classic thing. Across every gdmf metric, excluding with "true empathy", no one *gives a fuck* until it affects them, or someone within (1-3) degrees of separatation. And having broad empathy is generally a good way to get yourself labeled/astrocized: both about as obvious "compriate" and obvious "adversary".
astrocized - banished to outer space.
I do know how to spell ostracized ? I'm not sure if that's what I meant? Truly a mess.
It's not the Bonzi-buddy and driveby-installed IE toolbars wild west of the early 00s.
Can you please provide a link to a page where a “toolbar drive-by install” occurs?
In the early 2010s you had to have JS enabled for many sites to work at all. The cost:benefit equation had became entirely different.
I don't get it! The way JS is typically used, it doesn't even benefit from JIT all that much. Making ajax requests, doing stuff with strings, and moving DOM elements around doesn't need every CPU clock cycle to be used as optimally as possible. It's exceedingly rare for websites to actually be doing something that needs raw performance. And SPAs will be slow no matter what.
See most of the ecosystem around React, for reference. It's idiotic that things like URL management are done in Javascript. Or form controls. I guarantee that if we stopped doing this kind of stuff, JIT wouldn't matter.
To some extent this is just saying "developers will depend upon the performance given to them", and that's true, but it's also true that as soon as things like V8 and Node appeared, JS became ubiquitous. Pandora's container, if you will.
See most of the ecosystem around modern systems software, for reference. It's idiotic that things like memory layout and bit-level hardware management are done in C abstractions. I guarantee that if we stopped doing this kind of stuff, compiler optimizations wouldn't matter.
To some extent this is just saying "developers will depend upon the performance given to them", and that's true, but it's also true that as soon as things like compilers and standard libraries appeared, C became ubiquitous. Pandora's container, if you will.
Cute, but no, not even close to a good metaphor. The C example is abstracting away fundamental complexity in a new platform. The other is completely re-writing -- in duplicate and slightly broken -- what the platform gives you for free. There's nothing about implementing form controls or URL management in JS that is more abstract. It's just different; a downstream bad decision that branches off a long tree of other bad decisions.
The equivalent level of idiocy in a C-related metaphor would be...I dunno...if you decided that you didn't like the way that header files worked, and decided to keep the C compiler, but build an external header-file management system in Fortran [1] that calls the C compiler for you. Or even closer to the JS metaphor, you shipped a special C compiler that had an embedded interpreted language that only activated at compile time, and you then used that language to allow any user to fundamentally change the syntax of C.
(It hopefully shouldn't be lost on you that this exact approach to language features has been repeatedly tried in the javascript world, including right now, with package management. But see also: typescript, coffeescript before that, Dart, etc. Javascript is a mess, and history repeats itself with regularity about every 5 years.)
[1] ...and then you re-write that about sixty times, each time being slightly incompatible with the last, and all having different fundamental incompatibilities with C headers.
I've never used React myself, but what I've heard about it makes me question my own sanity. So are you going to tell me that instead of just updating the DOM tree directly I'm going to apply the changes to my data, then pass the entire model to the framework, which would then diff it with the previous version to get the changes back out, it would then call my functions that return components, and it would then diff the virtual DOM to find out what changed, and only then would it update the actual page? Why the fuck would anyone ever want that? What's so hard about simply changing the innerText or inserting elements or whatever?
Oh and now Google and Apple are insisting that this is the way to do UIs in native apps as well, with Compose and SwiftUI respectively.
The way the front end developer community seems to largely encourage learning top-down isn't helping either. I'll forever remember that one guy we made a small project with. He learned React but had no clue what "send a request" and "pass a parameter" means, and I had to explain him how to use XHR.
With thousands of DOM elements on a page, the DOM becomes a bottleneck. This isn't the fault of front-end developers, and it's not really the fault of browser developers. HTML/CSS/JS is a very powerful system, but it's also complex and can cost a lot of compute. When you understand this, then the reasons for React and other front-end frameworks become easier to accept.
I haven't looked into how browsers actually do it, but my mental model for it is that if something changes, this merely sets a flag on that element or its parent that its layout is not valid any more. Then, on next vsync, all the elements that have this flag set have their layout recalculated, potentially going up the tree as necessary. The only exception is if your script tries to get any layout-related property, e.g. offsetWidth. Then, as if as part of the getter of such a property, the layout recalculation will run immediately.
That is to say, if you need to make a lot of changes to the DOM, you should make them within one JS invocation so only one layout pass happens sometime after you're done.
The principle argument in favor of React today are developer ergonomics. People don't have to manually alter individual elements anymore -- they just describe state, and React takes care of the UI change set. On top of that, you have components, etc., that are debatably more pleasant to work with, and at the least create an ecosystem advantage for users of the framework. One can certainly see the argument for something like facebook, where there are probably dozens of different things changing independently at any given time.
But that said, one really has to question whether React makes sense anymore, given LLMs. Back when the alternative was that someone had to bespoke code every UI component, it might have been worth taking the hit of having to adopt the entire React ecosystem. But now that LLMs are writing the code, there's really no argument for developer ergonomics, and suddenly, things like "rewriting URL handling in JS" are pure liabilities.
[1] Though sadly, many front-end devs don't know this.
[2] https://rossenahuh.netlify.app/React/react-concept-1---virtu...
> But now that LLMs are writing the code
Hopefully that's a temporary state of affairs and everyone will eventually go back to writing code by hand. I've never even considered using an LLM to get my job done, the whole idea is as alien to me as are these types of UI frameworks. To me, the best language to describe what you want from a computer isn't English, it's a programming language.
The popular coding AIs go down all the time. Last week all of them were down at the same time. If there's a bug causing losses of thousands or millions of dollars per minute, do we really want to let the LLM write incomprehensible code?
It's so that you have the page reflecting your data at all times.
The browsers should have been written this way, instead of having byzantine update functions with all forms and a pair of *Text to rule them all. But creating it in Javascript is a really bad idea.
One of my problems was that I wanted to show data in the browser. It is a convenient delivery platform, after all. However, Chrome (and Chrome in particular) has tremendous trouble displaying large pages. A 400x400 table takes a long time to render. I could solve that in JavaScript. I had to, really.
So, as practically always, the problems stem from a combination of factors, and bad programming definitely is one of them.
Sites are slow because with all that excess performance they do more tracking, instead of keeping the website as-is.
Because that's the only thing business managers can come up with in that situation. It's a misaligned goal of users vs businesses.
In my opinion the "user agent" behavior of browsers is long gone, because they're not acting on behalf of their users anymore. They're acting on behalf of businesses.
Uh…no?
You’re presumably talking about specific terrible prebuilt frameworks - not someone building a nice vanilla SPA.
Please stop changing the definitions of explicit words and phrases - to anyone reading this!
For example, a search function. For a MPA, each search query would be a new page. For a SPA, each query is a new logical page, served on the same real page.
Technically yes, a SPA may have minimal client side rendering. But then it’s not doing much of anything at all - it’s just a site. When people say SPA, they typically mean an application with client side rendering.
sigh
…does someone else want to finish this up?
To expand on what I mean, if the implication isn’t obvious: a SPA with no client side rendering is just a single HTML page. It’s a document, not an application.
So SPA naturally implies client side rendering.
The difference between a SPA and MPA isn’t the amount of pages, they both have about the same amount of logic pages. It’s about where those pages are rendered. Dynamically on the front end, or on the back end.
EDIT: okay okay to expand, my website has a contact form. With JS enabled, the form submit displays a little box that says “thank you for submitting”. With JS disabled, it navigates you to a “thank you for submitting” page.
Both are the same logic page, they have the same function. One page is just rendered client side, and one server side. Most websites or applications are hybrids. There’s very few true single page applications, and very few true multi page applications. Most SPAs have multiple real pages for different things. Most MPAs combine multiple logic pages into one real page.
> Most websites or applications are hybrids.
and some are emphatically not.
But…where were you going with that?
As soon as you, say, use JS to update the DOM or a canvas, I consider that client-side rendering. That you can do, and that would be a SPA.
But I’m curious, what are some examples, even hypothetical, of applications consisting of one HTML page? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.
CSS (.css) JavaScript (.js) Plain Text (.txt) HTML (.html) SVG (.svg) Raster Images (.png, .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .webp, .bmp) Audio (.mp3, .wav, .ogg) Video (.mp4, .webm) JSON (.json) PDF (.pdf)
plus bring in other source resources as needed.
To answer your question:
The installer for GrapheneOS / Google Pixel phones is an “SPA” (or “webapp”).
I’ve seen bespoke fitness trackers of all kinds,
appliance control apps,
budget and pace-tracking stuff,
basically all of what computer programs used to do - before we started dynamically loading a ton of extra stuff onto the screen that nobody needed to do the task they came to do.
So, they are truly inseparable IMO. You can’t have a SPA without some amount of client side rendering, your example demonstrates that. So, what makes a SPA a SPA is the rendering. A SPA is “single page”, but only in literal meaning. Logically, every SPA is many pages, you just render them purely client-side.
and none of this seems to have anything to do with the frontend being a single page.
Could you point out where you think the gotcha is? I can taste the tone.
Just because a bunch of engineers applied implicit meaning that didn’t exist to a very literal phrase for a few years doesn’t make it correct.
Doesn’t make webapps inherently bad.
Doesn’t make SPAs bad.
At this point, app pretty much implies React - ask an LLM for an app and see if that’s not what you get.
especially when you’re writing your own stuff,
that’s when you know from the start that scaling doesn’t matter! =]
Related, and more powerful than my comments in this thread are going to be:
So you have to guarantee that your product will stay low users and low features forever or spend a very high effort to try to partially overcome that block when you change your mind.
And guaranteeing that it will stay low features is much harder than low users I think.
In exchange for that you get a better talent pool for recruiting but does that matter if your product has to stay low scale anyways?
It can work for some SaaS but if you stay low employee count, low users and you have a core feature used everywhere in the whole product and nothing else
Feels like a glaring omission =]
> Is it being used even sort-of in the right place / way?
It's a SaaS where users are mostly always logged-in, kind of an app so you would think it should work from the outside.
I think these are the full requirements I would put for a good SPA experience:
- low users
- low number of features / or a single main feature reused in different ways
- low number of employees
- it's an app and not a website
- you don't have any users living in remote places / poor internet connection
- users are all using modern browsers and can be asked to switch to another one if needed
And I think in my company we only have one of this list, making it painful.
at any point,
I’ll be checking back around later!
Until then: just talk smack about React!
None of these things you listed are critiques of single-page apps (SPA).
I'm sure counter examples of well managed SPAs do exist somewhere, it's just that it seems much easier to do the wrong thing compared to a traditional stack. This is why I'd not advise for it unless you have a very good reason.
The good stacks should make the good choices the natural way to do things, again my opinion.
That said, I think that the V8 team has done a fantastic job of securing their engine. Their heap sandbox feature is really inspiring! It's really wild that (as far as I can understand this issue) someone is able to bypass it.
(Posted from a memory safe browser - WebKit MiniBrowser compiled with Fil-C. Pretty sure this is safer than even V8 and the heap sandbox.)
It's easy to be safer, as long as performance can be sacrificed for it.
Complaining about a relatively small performance price for Fil-C in that context honestly feels like that one famous newspaper photo of a smoking pregnant woman drinking a beer with a caption saying she's wbrried about the effects of the loud construction noises next door on her unborn child.
Except even that is wrong, because at least she had a point about the construction noises, while this is more of a "refusing to eat your vegetables" kind of situation.
It took over two years and help from contributors to get to the point where WebKit could be made fully memory safe.
It’s only very heavy calculations that see a boost in performance. But, realistically, how many websites require this or currently use this today? <1%? Maybe <.1%?
This is pretty typical across JIT engines, too. PHP also sees only a slight increase in performance from the JIT. Because of the nature of PHP applications, most time is spend on the network and database. Only very CPU-heavy code sees a significant speed up.
That’s even the case for C#, which is why the dotnet runtime only conditionally JIT compiles code. Only hot path code is eligible for JIT compilation.
It still uses a WKWebView today, even in the EU, despite Apple now allowing alternative browser engines in the EU as of 2 years ago.
I'm sure Chrome will eventually ship Blink+V8 in the EU. It will take some time
In synthetic benchmarks, there was a 40-80% reduction in performance when disabling the JIT. But in a simulated test on YouTube.com, the performance delta was only 6%.
This isn’t the best source as it’s a bit old, and it wasn’t just JIT that was disabled. But the core idea is the same: calculation-heavy code can see an improvement, but most code won’t. Why this matters is how people actually use JS on the web. It’s not for cryptography and such, it’s to manipulate the DOM.
Microsoft also has some benchmarks here: https://microsoftedge.github.io/edgevr/posts/Super-Duper-Sec...
For PHP the RFC analyzes it: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/jit
We see a similar pattern: in synthetic benchmarks, the performance gain is large. But Wordpress, by far the largest PHP deployment in the wild, only saw ~3% performance gain. It again comes down to how PHP is used. It’s mostly HTML construction and database calls, neither of which will see any performance gain from a JIT. And, PHP has extensions, where most heavy code is moved to. Things like cryptography are done in PHP extensions, in C, where the JIT doesn’t matter. I’m more familiar with PHP, so I’ve known about the history of PHP not shipping a JIT due to the lackluster performance.
The only .NET implementations that interpret CIL were the .NET Compact and Micro frameworks due to hardware limitations, nowadays mostly gone as .NET workloads, and alternative implementations like Mono.
Yes, if your JavaScript engine is written in C++, it’s going to be very hard to avoid very gross bugs. We have better options now.
The ability of adversaries to find and exploit very gross bugs in C++ codebases should have already compelled the industry to move to memory safety. Now that AI has democratized the ability to scour C++ codebases for really gross and exploitable bugs, I should think that our hands are at last being forced. I’m not impressed by what I’ve seen in the industry with respect to taking memory safety seriously.
I also cringe at projects that "compile C to WASM" and then believe that it is immediately "memory-safe". (It really is not.)
The only exception for C/C++ projects is Fil-C which that is memory-safe. New projects at this point should just consider using Rust instead.
Sir, do you happen to have instructions for doing this? We who benefit from your philanthropy salute you.
This might oversell the agency that practicioners have.
Sandboxed zero-install delivery will outcompete anything with more frictionful installs.
It's probably not the right model for a pacemaker though.
Web/JS has been a double-edged sword for FOSS: sure, I can run a free OS, but if most of my "apps" happen to be JS that I can't practically control, then I have won a battle and lost a war.
There's also the problem of most free apps not doing a good job of providing license info and a link to source code, but this could be sidestepped by a trusted repository which provides license info itself.
We need simpler protocols and formats, especially those that are used over the internet. I want everyone to really start fighting for this.
I always use a browser that doesn't run any scripts (w3m) for both this reason and others. It hurts when I see websites that don't work without js. A bit funny though that this page is one of them so I was not able to read it.
But we do! It doesn't get much simpler than HTML/CSS/JS. It's just abused to make apps instead of web documents.
Wikipedia is basically the most popular application of all time and it doesn't rely on javascript. People just generally don't give a shit about where their money goes.
The whole biosphere is over there in the corner, weeping.
Which is why I have NoScript in my Firefox and have gotten used to manually enabling javascript for select pages. Small price to pay.
Unfortunately the web is full of trivial websites that have no business running javascript. Recently wanted to read the famed post on Gates Notes. But for some reason Bill requires javascript to render text and images. Which reminded me Bill is not a person with good judgement on matters of IT and policy. Time saved.
They get emotional (usually angry) when you tell them you disable javascript- as if every site that serves any kind of content has an automatic entitlement to run arbitrary code on your computer.
There not a lot of reason to not have at least a fallback to serve your text-only content without JS.
(I keep WASM and WebGL disabled in Firefox settings, too. Yes, I had another post ITT questioning why those things are any less secure than the JavaScript, given that they're supposed to be in a sandbox. But you know, defense in depth. It's insane that we're expected to put up with these grossly unnecessary risks all the time. Just like how it's insane that frontier models are being tested in environments that are physically capable of connecting to the Internet at large.)
I am decidedly uninterested in those features for most web pages I visit. Should they be able to spin up my CPU fan just for that I would consider it a misfeature. Just like a movie on high volume would be.
If anyone familiar with Firefox could implement that or point in the right direction, that would be most welcome.
But, anyone who thinks we need JS for a functional internet is fucking retarded
Do you remember what the alternative was? Flash, Java, ActiveX. No thank you.
Sure security is difficult but vulnerabilities of this magnitude are rare. If anything the lesson is don't write highly security sensitive software in C/C++.
The security implications are just the cherry on top.
Fortunately I disabled js by default. Unfortunately, it breaks about 30% of the web. Including nvd.nist.gov, which shows a completely blank page without js enabled, even though with js it’s just a simple page with only static content.
Only 30?
Only 30%? In 2026? With CloudFlare and Anubis et al absolutely everywhere? Not to mention SPAs
Anubis is trivially bypassed by an extension.
More like 99%
I use Firefox with Noscript and I'm _totally aware_ that almost no website works without allowing it JS.
Even using Noscript it's becoming more and more exhausting every year, it's plain impossible to browse the internet without JS at all.
This is not something just anyone is going to rush into. Bigger teams or js/ts evangelists will eventually arrive at that point if they're running something where no-js (really a side effect of seo goals) is important, but "normal people" will spend this time and engineering effort elsewhere.
I think the industry in general is moving past React, as now, and definitely in near future, the only thing that matters is ideas, the rest is for the LLMs to figure out, and so the "frameworks" are going to completely disappear from people's minds as "programming" essentially becomes "telling the AI what to do" and the AI writes asm or even binary. That is when, no JS, may become more viable again lol.
People, including me, resist it, but in the future "programming" is not going to be about writing code (or even checking it, we're way too slow and error-prone to do that), but about coming up with ideas of how to capture real world problems in an IT system, and how to solve those problems by existing (or novel) ways, picking the right tools for the job (say a statistician picking the fitting metric to capture some property of the system that will actually project meaningful observability improvements and not be "just a bunch of noise") and making the right architectural decisions in terms of correctness, performance, scope, taking into account deadlines and budget. And being the domain model glue. Everything else, all the nitty gritty we used to call programming, all the <insert a quadrillion of CS jargon keywords>, is going to be done by AI ... it's a mag 9.5 quake tsunami and it can't be stopped now.
This might completely wipe out things like React (which are largely made for humans writing the code, not for humans consuming the output of that code) faster than anyone thought possible.
The V8 vulnerability being exploited today, CVE-2026-85046, is listed in NVD under CWE-843, "Access of Resource Using Incompatible Type ('Type Confusion')."[2] On this class of vulnerabilities, MITRE explains:
> When a memory buffer is accessed using the wrong type, it could read or write memory out of the bounds of the buffer
Memory safety is specifically intended to prevent errors like these from becoming arbitrary out-of-bounds memory access and native code execution. Even type safety --- from the 1970s --- can prevent type confusion.
The CISA and the NSA have called for the adoption of memory-safe languages.[3] We exercise poor engineering judgment and poor ethics, as an industry, when we continue to expose users to classes of wholly avoidable security weaknesses in Internet-facing software.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed
[2] https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/843.html
[3] https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Press-Releases-Statements/Pre...
Here's the commit that fixes this issue: https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8/+/e0562d87ad9c17042b...
We’re past the era where security issues emanating from memory-unsafe code were tolerated due to being unavoidable — continuing to expose your software’s users to them in this present day and age is simply a choice.
But if I'm wrong, dare say, how would you write a production memory-safe JIT compiler today?
Security is where the rubber hits the road. It's whether customers' identities get stolen. It's whether leaders of undemocratic countries can monitor communications, locations, and social networks of people whom they oppress.
Calling this an "ivory tower" criticism is, ironically, a lack of acknowledgement of reality and that our actions have consequences to others.
There are classes of type system—"dependently-typed"—where you can encode arbitrary predicates into the type checking. I've remember seeing examples where they could prove arbitrary facts at the assembly level, including self-modifying code. Lean is such a language, currently very popular, but there are others.
Correctness of such programs depends on some basic assumptions about the CPU/memory environment, which should work absent hardware bugs like speculative execution or side channels. Although these could probably be encoded as well, and accounted for.
Without such a general proof language, you could probably make a special language to support JIT development, although its type system would be very complicated and the language itself could be a source of bugs.
Given such languages or proofs (maybe tractable now with AI-assisted theorem proving), you can actually make insanely performant code, since you don't really need to rely on other runtime protection so much (although maybe a good idea still).
Per OP link, it only affects Chrome versions prior to .82; .82 was released as stable 2 days ago. [1]
(HN title also does not match the original title, which is the CVE ID -- not particularly intuitive.)
[1] https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2026/09/stable-channel...
https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Vanadium/releases
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases
Only if you use Nightly wait maybe not.
> Type confusion in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 152.0.7977.82 allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code inside the sandbox via a crafted HTML page.
So it was fixed in 152.0.7977.82 (before .83), if I read that right.
"Affected products: ... Up to (excluding) 152.0.7977.82"
.82 is fixed.
It's because User Interaction is Required. CVSS 10 would be the case where everyone can be exploited without interaction.
Interestingly the 8.8 is more alert-worthy than the 9.8 and 10 cvss, because there is a need to be alerted of the current security risk, whereas with a cvss 2 vuln, there is nothing to be done by users, only admins.
> allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code *inside the sandbox*
I have a feeling someone’s going to make an open source browser using Ladybird’s engine before Ladybird has official binaries.
I know this is old: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
but has the situation changed substantially in favor of Firefox?
https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1unhtxu/initial...
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/security-chromium-ve...
The reason why I support Gecko and Ladybird’s engine is because I am opposed to monoculture, however. Even if Gecko (Firefox) is less secure than Chromium (Chrome, Edge, etc.), by not having a monoculture, a Chrome exploit will only take down the subset of people using the Chromium ecosystem, and not affect Gecko users. Alas, most people are in the Chromium ecosystem right now so that means malicious hackers only need to target one codebase.
It’s the same reason I wrote MaraDNS back in 2001—back then, there was only one open source DNS server[1,2] so I wrote another one.[3]
[1] Djbdns was around back then but wasn’t open source, which limited its adoption.
[2] https://lwn.net/2001/0208/
[2] MaraDNS was and is optimized for running at most a few dozen domains on a system running a bunch of other services, where one does not want the DNS server causing security problems for the server, and where the DNS server needs to be lightweight as possible.
"CISA maintains the authoritative source of vulnerabilities that have been exploited in the wild."
Is this chained with n-days?
So maybe we're going to see another CVE for the sandbox escape soon?
Those folks would not be disclosing their sandbox escape unless they were good guys.
(Posted with a memory safe WebKit, Fil-C FTW)
In the context of this vulnerability, I doubt memory safety would have made much of a difference.
This is a great reminder though, currently doing a full userspace replacement on my 3D printer and Fil-C might be just what I need for the irreplaceable C parts.
So I think memory safety does matter in that case.
You would think that an engineering school would be wiser than to require their students use a specific web browser that’s tied to a specific vendor.
Schools are a business run by administrative staff who make purchasing decisions to solve business problems. Schools love to reduce billable teaching hours through online coursework, which invites academic dishonesty from students, and paying for honorlock is a way to achieve that reduction in expenditure, rather than paying tutors to supervise exams in person.
What's the difference between "executing arbitrary code inside the sandbox via a crafted HTML page" and running whatever is in the <script> tag?
https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/northstar-browser/blob/m...
(Posted from memory safe WebKit; i.e. WebKit compiled with filcc and all of WebKit's dependencies compiled with filcc.)
I have a new tech called SaRCAsm, which is a memory-safe assembler. So the next step is a "Sarcastic JIT" :-)
It's damn near impossible to verify that the JIT is correct.
But it is possible to verify at runtime that the code that the JIT emitted obeys some memory safety law.
(V8's heap sandbox is an example of this; a sarcastic JIT would be an arguably stronger example of this.)
IIRC rustc still has a couple of known soundness bugs, for example. It’s only been a few weeks since someone managed to exploit Lean, and Lean is all about formalizing things :)
Then build WebKit using do_cmake_yolo_simpler.sh in projects/webkitgtk-2.44.3
It's still pretty rough, but works more than well enough to post on HN. My regression test is to post on X. That works too
Pls file bugs if you encounter issues.
Also, fair warning, it's hella slow right now on JS-heavy websites (like X). It barely works.
But we can fix that with some effort, I think
WebKit's JS engine (JavaScriptCore) is super friendly to pointer capabilities. I did not have to change much to make it use the Fil-C GC instead of its own GC and to make it use a capability per JS object.
On the other hand, Chromium's JS engine (V8) does a bunch of crazy stuff with pointer encoding, so the best you could do there is probably a single arena for the whole JS heap.
Also, JavaScriptCore has a well-supported mode that involves not only zero JIT but a fully portable C++ interpreter. Not sure V8 has that.
"Sorry, but to enter this shop you need to take one of the used syringes from that pile some dude delivers every day and poke yourself with it."
The "all chromium versions" part of the title is also misleading, most browser CVEs do not distinguish between "untested lower bound" vs "affects all" (even though it seems like it'd be trivial to bisect).
fly.io depends on Firecracker microVMs, so you should be concerned if you're running untrusted code, but not concerned about other people interacting with you wrt v8.
Cloudflare depends on v8 isolates, which depend on the trustworthiness of the v8 sandbox, which is a non-trivial hurdle, but not an insurmountable one for attackers with the resources to have a v8 bug in the first place.
I'd prefer they ask here. Just saying.
Let's say that you have a type confusion bug that (in terms of the interpreted language) allows you to use an Integer variable as an Array.
That sounds nonsensical when just considering the high-level language, but your computer is going to need something to work with when running a script. For an Integer variable it will for example store the value, and for an Array it would store a pointer to a data area (and that area then contains values).
Now, if the interpreter loses track of which type a certain variable is, then it will also not know whether to interpret the internal data as a plain value (arbitrarily chosen by the script/attacker) or a pointer to well-formed data (carefully chosen by the runtime).
As an immediate step, letting the attacker use an address of their choosing for array operations would allow them to read and write arbitrary memory that is reachable with this form of addressing.
I'm putting specific emphasis on "form of addressing" here, because the v8 authors have considered this possibility and put additional protections in place. Within the sandbox, "addresses" are limited to a size of 32 bits, and address within a dedicated 4 Gigabyte area that is specifically for interpreter data. Within that area you are not going to find a lot of critical data to affect outside operations, you'd have to find a way to escape that memory area first.
The next part is going to be a bit hazy because it's been some time since I did Chromium exploitation, and getting code execution within the sandbox from data writes is itself not an easy task.
Now, we have established that there is not a lot of terribly important data within the 4 GB area. The data managing the interpreter lives outside, and any JITed code will also live outside because it needs different access permissions. We only really get to play with Objects and their data.
Objects handling executable code are rare, but there are a few that are at least adjacent. Last time I checked, WASM was one feasible choice where you get reasonably predictable results with custom data, as it included a pointer to actual executable code that represents the WASM program.
Under the assumption that the WASM interpreter/compiler does its job correctly the full block of executable code will not be very interesting. However, any integer constant in the program will end up somewhere within the executable code, and that would give you enough controllable data to encode one or two arbitrary instructions and a relative jump to the next integer constant. To start execution at the first integer constant, we'd then just modify the Object data of the WASM program to slightly offset the entrypoint.
And that's the short form of a possible (and likely outdated) way of getting semi-arbitrary code execution within the sandbox (as we are running as a WASM program, and therefore have all the usual syscall restrictions and other security features engaged).
What's an actual snippet of pseudo-JS that could make the engine overrun its memory and start reading out of arbitrary addresses, even within the sandbox? Wouldn't that have been accounted for in the most basic design?
I'll have to note that I'm probably way worse than anyone doing this professionally or semi-professionally. This is the extent of what I learned as part of university, which was exclusively using planted vulnerabilities. The knowledge required to find and exploit such issues in a real-world scenario goes much deeper. My dayjob in security is on the entirely opposite side, since I'm doing defensive security on the system-level.
In short, it is quite likely that someone may join in and point out where my information is outdated or plain wrong. (Please do so!)
> My experience with C/C++ is somewhat limited but I imagine V8 does something like reserve a whole bunch of addresses and then manage them itself [...]
That is essentially correct, that's what the 4 Gigabyte allocation I mentioned before is. Let's call it the "v8 heap", because it is distinct from the heap that your system manages (which is the one used for `malloc` and `new`), but it will largely work in the same way.
> [...] with some internal list where script arrays/objects correspond to blocks.
v8 does have a lot of internal checks to make sure that what it is touching looks sane (at least on debug builds), but it will not have a lot of duplicated information. Having to check or update information in multiple places is both an artificial limit on performance as well as its own source of bugs (if not kept in sync correctly).
If v8 needs a JavaScript Object then it will simply ask the v8 heap for an appropriately sized memory allocation and fill in its data there, not unlike normal C or C++ objects (except that v8 usually refcounts, I believe). After this it will simply continue to work with the pointer that it already has.
> But what scripted integer or array could you pass it that would access anything already freed or outside the bounds of the addresses that array was mapped to?
You need to keep in mind that in this scenario, reading/writing outside the intended memory area is already the effect that we want to achieve, it is not the vulnerability.
We are not abusing some insufficient bounds check on an existing Array, _we make v8 believe that there is an Array_ (or at the very least something that it can use like one; in either case it's completely made up), and it happens to have its data stored at the location and length that we want.
> Wouldn't that have been accounted for in the most basic design?
Yes, and for that reason the interpreter itself is considered pretty much battle-tested. However, in search for more performance, multiple JavaScript engines have turned towards engineering Just-In-Time compilers to accelerate running code that runs so often that the compile overhead is worth it. v8 / Chromium / Google alone have a set of three JIT compilers (Sparkplug, Maglev, TurboFan) that compile interpreter bytecode to actual machine instructions depending on what is currently required and how fast the resulting code should be.
> What's an actual snippet of pseudo-JS that could make the engine overrun its memory and start reading out of arbitrary addresses, even within the sandbox?
Those are a bit hard to come by, even more so since the focus for v8 exploitation has changed to targeting the JIT compilers. This usually means that a lot of the exploit would be concerned with wrangling the compiler into place.
I'll try to give an example of what a type confusion involving the JIT compiler looks like, but this is based on work by my classmates, since I never finished that particular part of the exercise. It is also recited purely from recollection, since I'm not near my university notes.
To get the best possible code optimization the compiler wants to work with some assumptions. If any of those don't hold anymore, the compiler should either never have optimized or at the very least it should deoptimize before anything happens and fall back to a more flexible way of running that code.
One such nugget of information is whether certain well-known properties (let's say .name) can have side effects, those are kept as lists in the source code of the compiler [1]. If the compiler is told that .name can not mutate its object (contrary to the specification and the remainder of the v8 implementation), then it may choose to elide type change checks within the optimized function (that has already been optimized for a specific type) and miss a deoptimization.
If v8 then uses the optimized function after it should have been deoptimized, we essentially get a function that uses an area of memory as if it were a different type of object.
PS: I should get back into this, even just explaining already-done things sounds fun.
[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8/+/9f30cc5fc4ad6c3236...
That makes it possible for me to visualize how a use-after-free might work inside a JIT engine's sandbox. If I'm not misunderstanding, you're saying that the type confusion attack could be accessed by changing something as simple as the prototype for Object, in a way that the JIT compiler was hardcoded to ignore? Essentially that the compiler is not built to spec, and then getting the garbage collector to somehow free the extra memory, it's still possible to open a hole to read sequential blocks. But the main flaw would be that the compiler reserves X memory for quickly writing an object and then in some unoptimized phase sees that the object only took up X-y and reuses a portion of it...?
I'm a high school dropout..Am I seeing this right?
{
int msgType;
union {
char *name;
int nameID;
};That finally convinced me getting data using functions (accessors, getters, setters) is a good thing, even in C :) Just all that unnecesary if's are so annoing and killing performance...
I want Chrome stay open source, but why should I believe it's possible?
like those news agencies have obituaries of famous old people pre-written
I bet famous people have their people write one to distribute immediately.
Also, writing those for your family sucks, easier to do it when they are alive and can tell some key stories.
Same for the Linux kernel. Considering the Fermat's Last Theorem lean proof was 13MLoC and cost $300,000 it would cost $2M to rewrite Chromium & Linux in Rust going purely of combined LoC.
Windows: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/d...
Linux: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/0e94f26e8/d...
https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8.git/+/refs/heads/mai...
can't get a proper ios/Android RCE with just JS code exec
But the process is still more capable than the VM. The process can talk to other processes via IPC, for example.
That's why you don't go from "javascript -> computer is taken over", instead you go from "javascript -> renderer control -> computer is taken over".
However, chrome.exe itself does because it's a native application, as is the sandboxed JavaScript interpreter inside of chrome.exe.
(This is a very oversimplified explanation but I think this is the disconnect people are having)
this is besides the point, but javascript has the file system api.
anyways to your broad point, i dont think this is convincing. What's the difference between not having an api vs having an api that is disabled (e.g. the syscall exists but is filtered). Either way you are not taking the action. RCE in the sandbox is an important step in the bigger exploit chain, but not because you can express things in the traditional syscalls inside the sandbox.
Well which is precisely why we have sandboxes.
To me "executing arbitrary code in the sandbox" is similar to "I don't give a flying fuck for it's what a sandbox is for".
More information is needed. As someone commented: this has to be paired with at least another exploit to make anything remotely useful.
A sandbox is a sandbox. We want to understand how "code running in a sandbox" is "actively exploited".
My read of Google's disclosure is that there is likely no known escape from the sandbox. I don't agree this would be reported this way just because "user action" like "using web browser" is required. Even if this individual CVE is correctly an 8.8 there would be a critical assessment of a known chain. The only reason there wouldn't be, would be if the other vulnerability is known to Google but has no patch yet.
Even with the sandbox protection layer, the rest of the parameters are maxed out.
Which is exactly what happened here, as it turns out. This isn't a breakout (or isn't alleged to be a breakout) to the broader OS, only to the sandbox environment.
It can’t trick Canva into letting you use the color picker, or otherwise enable it, can it - if someone happens to know?
(What a dumb feature to be locked to the Googlesphere.)
For non technical users, scam adverts are probably the biggest threat.
So i agree ubo is an important security technology, but its probably irrelavent to the topic at hand.
If you're paranoid, disable JIT.
(And no, I don't use it except for testing).
That said I still use Firefox for other reasons.
I simply don’t trust google, I don’t trust Mozilla either but I do trust them more than Google and you do kinda have to have a browser to function in the modern world.
Chromium is still far superior on the security front than any other browser.