Let's take a moment to talk about the monetary value of this vulnerability.<p>According to the Chrome release page (<a href="https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2026/09/stable-channel-update-for-desktop_01882797386.html" rel="nofollow">https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2026/09/stable-channel...</a>), Google paid a researcher $1000 for ethically reporting this.<p>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?<p>Ethical disclosure is a complicated topic, because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or <i>demand</i> 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?<p>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.
If the vulnerability is already being exploited in the wild --- as in, it's a vector people already know about and are tracking --- it's possibly not worth much at all. Vulnerability valuations depend heavily on the lifespan of the vulnerability; payments on black market are tranched (explicitly or less explicitly, as with "maintenance payments") based on whether they're patched.<p>Further: a <i>vulnerability</i> 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.
Isn’t the implication that the vulnerability had already been found and exploited instead of reported to Google, because its value to Google was so low? Whoever found it originally had more incentive to sell it on the grey/black market. Or is the incentive structure truly different for vulnerabilities discovered to be already in the wild?
Some exploit hunters sell strictly to the grey/black market to avoid opsec issues. If you're selling on both, you're more likely to be identified by both.
Surely google has telemetry when their sandbox is escaped? (Only mostly /s)
I was under the impression that the three letter agencies and contractors bought vulnerabilities?
Sometimes, yes. But usually, as a security researcher, you usually sold to brokers. The brokers made the vulnerability into a reliable exploit. That is whst they then sold to agencies. For a markup of course. The industry was in a tough spot already the past years. Now AI is shaking it up even more.
They want the good shit, not this bargain bin fuckup
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Knowing the vulnerability, creating an exploit might be relatively easy now that we have AI to figure the boring stuff out.
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Mate, it’s a style thing that depends on which style guide you’re following<p>AP recommends spaces around them, whereas Chicago doesn’t<p>besides if we’re critiquing incorrect following of English orthography<p>—Sentences should be capitalized<p>—The word “don’t” requires an apostrophe<p>—End sentences with a period<p>—That’s incorrect usage of an em-dash at the end there — but what does it matter anyways ;)
Books I've read would disagree. Are you the emdash police?
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How much money is lost by consumers/businesses for every hour the vulnerability is exploited in the wild with no patch?
The value of the report is dependent on the scarcity of the knowledge. If anybody can report it, the bid goes down.
The value of future reports should also be a component though. By paying a low amount you discourage ethical bug bounty hackers from bothering to look for more exploits. If I think I'm only getting $1000 for a Chrome issue versus $100,000 for an Acme Co issue, I'll be spending my time looking for Acme Co issues.<p>Bug bounties are as much a way of attracting talent to even <i>try</i> to exploit your system as they are about the exploits themselves. If you lowball the bounties the talent goes elsewhere.
How do you figure? The value of the report is, ethics aside, the same as the value of exploiting it. Doesn’t matter if I can conceive of it, it matters if I can exploit it.
Supply and demand has to be considered. The more parties aware of the vulnerability, the more attractive sellers (reporters) have to make their ask to the buyer (defender).
Not following that. The report is the upstream resource the exploit needs. The value of iron ore is definitely not the value of the steel made with it. Or maybe I misunderstood your view?
There is a theta decay component. The zero day is highly valuable until known; once known, its value rapidly declines to zero.
That’s not how things are valued. That’s moreso how the absence of something is valued.
That's really informative but maybe a little overly capitalist-brained.<p>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.
Well, the implication (and I'm not saying this is right) is that to Google it's only worth $1k to have this brought to their attention by a white hat, versus finding out by exploitation.<p>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.
But google is also a monopsony. There isn't anyone else the researcher can ethically sell it to. They just have to take whatever bounty google decides to pay.
That’s exactly right, and applies to more than Google. I can’t think of a single browser vendor that would think a single vulnerability materially causes reputational damage.
No company will ever value your privacy or security more than or equal to how much you value them. This is why you gotta keep an unencrypted bitcoin private key in your password manager. I'll know pretty quickly (within ~ 10 minutes or less) that someone has access to all of my passwords.
While I agree 1000 is hilariously low for this, worth is hard to quantify. Do you pay what it could theoretically cost your company? the amount the top bidding bad actor would be willing to pay?
The discount Google is getting on bounties versus internal spend is easy to estimate:<p><pre><code> # 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
</code></pre>
While we lack the data to be sure, it is reasonable to estimate that they're getting a discount of 90% or better versus internal spend on this bounty payment, <i>if</i> one assumes that they do not have many sandbox RCEs left undiscovered. It's unclear whether that assumption holds, but with only a <i>single</i> researcher at an assumed $0.5mil/year (all-inclusive after pay, stock, and benefits) is enough to support the plausibility of that 90% figure, before accounting at market rates for their internal use of the house AIs.<p>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 <i>hundreds</i> of RCEs per year, or they're <i>significantly</i> discounting bounty payments versus their actual worth, or they're <i>negligent</i> in budgeting for RCE discovery at all, or they assign <i>zero value</i> 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!
> 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<p>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).
Having previously worked near a bounty program, I can confirm that they are <i>regardless</i> flooded with people fishing for bounties, even before AI, no matter how cheap the bounty may be — people will grift anything with the most pathetic skript kiddie attempts possible to try and pad their resume with a hit, and bounties that pay $0 are more valuable than pull requests that pay $0.
You let the market decide. Google could purchase the bugs on the same market blackhats do.
Google directly competes with the grey market for vulnerabilities. They are competitive in a bunch of different directions:<p>* They pay for vulnerabilities without reliable exploits (more for vulnerabilities that are demonstrably reliable).<p>* They don't require you to actually build a reliable exploit chain.<p>* They pay up front, not in tranches.<p>* They work with essentially all comers, unlike the grey market, where you're generally subcontracting to sell your first few.
we really do not want to engineer a system in which using bugs to make money is considered economically legitimate activity. It is still crime. The main reason to report bugs and get the bounties for doing so is still because it makes the world safer and healthier. The money is there to make is to incentivize the work of finding and reporting them -- not to outbid the bad actors.
I would say that maintaining legacy systems as a software engineer is effectively "using bugs to make money" and very much an "economically legitimate activity".<p>If old systems had no bugs/issues, companies could do without the maintenance burden altogether (which includes even systems not being evolved/extended).
Companies sometimes reward their employees with important bug fixes. When I worked on a big dev team, we'd even decide what were the most important fixes and give people a special 5k bonus or something.<p>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.
"Crime" is very flexible term. One country's criminal is another country hero. Maybe the author would sell the vulnerability to an organization making exploits for government use.<p>"Safety" is also a relative thing, when the world is safer for one party, it is usually worse for another.
Having secure browsers, encryption etc. actually clearly benefits the world. No “but think about the children/terrorists” please.
As our surroundings grow more secure, the justice system variant of swatting becomes a greater portion of the threats to worry about. There will be abuseable bugs and situations in our non static world, there is no way we'll ever have perfect security of anything. So a motivated actor with a grudge should be able to plant something a place you provably beyond reasonable doubt have sole control of, given enough time. How do you propose then that we secure deniability once the justice system is wielded as a weapon against the innocent, when everyone feels that there is no reasonable way defects exist and could have been used? Just look at the British post office scandal, real world justice systems have already operated under the assumption that software doesn't have bugs for decades, which speaks volumes on their inclination to believe that they both exist and are used by a unknown third party with ill intent. Thus the widespread trust in that things are secure is a threat in itself. And unlike airports we don't need the users to have an artificial sense of security for computers, networks, software, and digital services to be viable markets.
Brain dead moral relativism argument. The question is whether eg. a group trying to scam elders out of insurance money or a Columbian cartel to hack local politicians to do blackmail, or South Sudan to hack Darfur or whatever, should be allowed to compete with the companies making products for their own exploits.<p>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.<p>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
> The main reason to report bugs and get the bounties for doing so is still because it makes the world safer and healthier.<p>Yeah let's see how this plays out, paying people less than their time is worth for RCEs.
> we really do not want to engineer a system in which using bugs to make money is considered economically legitimate activity. It is still crime.<p>"Making money from bugs" is not solely a black-market activity. There are plenty of grey and even white hat activities in this market.
Finding bugs is hardly a crime, selling them even isn't.<p>Now exploiting them? Yes that's a crime.
> using bugs to make money<p>Aka security research.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.
>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?<p>Thanks for putting it like that, it changed my opinion on the subject.<p>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.
> using bugs to make money [is a crime]<p>No it’s not lol
Well, someone did decide to tell google about this in exchange for a thousand dollars (albeit unclear how much the money was the motivator). Doesn't that mean the market did decide in google's favour?
Someone decided to tell Google about this in exchange for an unknown amount of money, chosen unilaterally by Google at a later date, at which point the market value of the vulnerability is $0.<p>There's no way money is the motivator.
Blackhat markets will always be able to pay better. Selling to Google though you aren't chancing jail time.
They would be broke quick.
In the past I would have thought this would incentivize finding bugs that might never be found. However it is now clear that all bugs that can be found will be found. So this makes a ton of sense.
> In the past I would have thought this would incentivize finding bugs that might never be found.<p>Isn't that a good thing?<p>> However it is now clear that all bugs that can be found will be found. So this makes a ton of sense.<p>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.
Because there’s still a sizable group of people who see $1,000 from Google as more than $1,000.<p>Even a resume item.
Sure they make sense — you need some incentive to drive the price to zero.
ideally, an auction and the vendor or a government can bid against malicious actors (which can also be a government). hard to set up though.
What kind of auction would you like to run?<p>Remember that you can sell the same vulnerability to multiple people: it's software you can copy.
Maybe needs a Good-Guy-Buy-It-Now w/instant delivery at a fair price. (OK that’s kind of a threat—you’re running an auction and you have the price the corp has to pay to avoid the auction ending.)<p>$1k is so dumb and the fact we’re discussing auctions is proof (hello, Sundar, what you doing over there?).<p>Guess this will change <i>after</i> the next e.g. nationwide hospital ransomware by a hacker who publicly laments bounty rates, if the news cycle accommodates the story long enough.
it seems unlikely google's lawyers would go for this
Maybe some code is so important and heavily trafficked it becomes a public works project, and various legs can bid for pieces of the project, line how all infrastructure works.
well that's why setting it up is hard, because you would want to do it in a way that what they want doesn't matter.
you're taking someone's word it's being exploited. It says right at the top of the report<p>> allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code *inside the sandbox*<p>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
If this would have included a full RCE chain with Sandbox escape Google would have paid significantly more.<p>Having just a Sandbox RCE is neat, I've got some on my laptop currently, but it's just a piece of the puzzle.
Makes you wonder how many hacks wouldn't have occurred if security researchers (and vulnerability disclosure) was actually rewarded proportional to the possible/potential damage said vulnerability may have otherwise caused.<p>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).
There are plenty of people out there who find vulnerabilities and sell them to the highest bidder. Anyone is welcome to do it, including the researchers and hackers reporting them responsibly. There's no need to try and make a convoluted ethical justification. "I did this bad thing because you didn't pay me enough not to" doesn't work past the 6th grade.
this is why again, researchers should just honestly sell these to vuln brokers instead of donating them to trillion dollar companies for nothing.<p>nothing will change until big tech can no longer rip off security researchers
They're not going to stop underpaying security researchers just because security researchers decide to sell them to vuln brokers. Advocating for this is reckless.
they will if it becomes common knowledge that nobody serious is participating in their bug bounty programs. besides, they have incredibly deep pockets and they can afford to pay 6 figures for bugs like these<p>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.
Who is to say they didn’t already do that?
But my “Google paid me” on my resume!
The potential damage is all to users bound by terms and conditions, who are unlikely to collect damages successfully from a vendor. Structurally, vendors don’t have to care. Therefore, vulnerabilities have little direct financial value to a vendor.<p>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.<p>A vulnerability which lets an attacker harm the <i>vendor</i> has much higher direct financial value.
> 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?<p>On average, probably not that much. What's the amortized cost of all testing, static analysis, and audit / code review, per "prevented potential bug"?
> 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.<p>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.<p>That said, the gap is probably not just that.
It seems like by definition it is.<p>Someone could sell it on the black market, sell it to Google, or just move on with their life and not sell it.<p>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
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Interesting question, and how much should a user pay Google to fix the vulnerability? I suppose the smallest unit of currency less than the amount of effort they'd have to put in to mitigate it. A fully market economy of bug fixing here is an interesting idea, certainly, but if I'm being honest I actually don't want to pay Google a thousand dollars to fix security issues. In the limit, what would happen is that I end up with the competitor browser Elgoog Emorhc which fixes security issues for free, and pays very little for them, which is the status quo.<p>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.<p>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.
With such low payment, it makes one wonder how many exploits exist which were sold to 3rd parties and are currently used in the wild without Google even knowing about it.
It sounds insultingly low, yeah. I'm trying to imagine why they would pay so little. The only two reasons I can think of are either (a) they were already aware of it and fixing it, and therefore the report didn't really change much, or (b) it requires an unusual configuration or otherwise rare opportunity to that makes it impractical to exploit most users. Really curious to see what the issue was whenever it gets made public.
"because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment"
Maybe they should now, not like anyone else cares about ethics anyway.
Imagine the consideration for the Trump admin, should we pay this guy a million bucks for this attack that gets us into the command system of Iran, or would that be unethical. Of course they don't consider that at this time.
I heard, on the podcast Darknet Diaries, that there are auctions for zero days in Argentina. This security researcher could probably have cleared a million dollars for a bug like that if they were unscrupulous. The bug bounty should absolutely be higher.
People are free to pool their money and offer higher bounties.
If you really explore the concept of worth, Google "engineers" are grossly overpaid, otherwise they would have found this themselves already.<p>How many PMs are making more than bug bounties to fetch coffee and bagels?<p>Their priorities are all out of order.
>Ethical disclosure is a complicated topic, because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment<p>Why not?<p>"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."<p>Sounds like a basic contract to me<p>What I do think is ethically dubious is:<p>"Hey I found this bug and I will MAKE IT PUBLIC WITHIN 90 DAYS SO LOOK AT IT"<p>I know it's a convention from 'security researchers', but I think the first approach is more ethical than the latter.
> 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?<p>What? That's not how you calculate the value of something <i>at all</i>.<p>The value is not based on the prevention, it's the cost of the cure.
> Ethical disclosure is a complicated topic, because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment.<p>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.
The problem is they are being flooded with both fake AND real disclosures. Imagine if they tried to pay out $250,000 or more per bug? Would the cost be worth it? Maybe, but shareholders may not be pleased... Unless they viewed it as insurance against it being more financially sound for the finder to sell the exploit on the gray or black market instead...
In fact, Google will pay you $250,000 for a full chain exploit. The CVE reported here is a renderer process vulnerability. Google used to pay more for those before the vulnpocalypse. Now, they are fixing hundreds of bugs per week that they find themselves.<p><a href="https://bughunters.google.com/about/rules/chrome-friends/chrome-vulnerability-reward-program-rules" rel="nofollow">https://bughunters.google.com/about/rules/chrome-friends/chr...</a>
Pre-flood, they didn’t pay more did they?<p>> viewed it as insurance<p>Of course. Beyond the ethics, the social obligation, sleeping well at night by compensating hardworking people fairly.<p>“We can’t pay more or we’d have to hire more human reviewers” should never be a massive company’s line of thinking.
They should just multiply a base rate against the severity level. Say the base rate is ranged so low-severity stuff is $500-1K base but high-severity stuff is $10K base. That would net a researcher ~$88K for this specific bug (8.8 severity).
That would create a perverse incentive to inflate the severity levels even more than they already are
CVE severity is a terrible way to do this. If you follow the cybersecurity space you should know why.
it's such a drop in the bucket, it wouldn't make any difference
Seems like it was worth $1000 to the researcher in question.
> researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment.<p>why? google removed <i>don't be evil</i> off their charter a long time ago. why shouldn't security researchers also seek to maximize profits?
You've been on HN for 16 years and still comment the lowest brow possible comment on security vulnerability threads that the bounty isn't big enough. How many times do we need to have a top comment crying about the same thing? If you think its too little, sell the exploits you find for more.
<i>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?</i><p>in the darkweb, due to crypto, a lot. there is where the $ is, whether it's stealing crypto directly or phishing developers.
> Ethical disclosure is a complicated topic, because researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment.<p>I mean, why not?
>researchers shouldn't hold bugs for ransom or demand high payment.<p>Hell no, the same level bugs at Google should be <i>enthusiastically</i> 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.<p>>it makes sense to pay them what the bug's actually worth.<p>Honest fair-dealing should come into play <i>at least</i> 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.<p>Just apparently not at Google.<p>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 <i>generosity</i> vs Scrooge-like behavior.<p>What's missing from their overall business acumen if they can't even afford to project an image of generosity yet?<p>If they're not <i>actively making a serious effort</i> to pay the maximum they can well afford for bugs that are truly serious, there is a technical term for that. Chickenshit.
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