14 DAY TRIAL // Just five days after releasing the most advanced milestone of Chrome for Windows through the Dev channel, Google has also pushed forward the Stable flavor of the browser. “The stable channel has been updated to 4.0.249.89 for Windows,” revealed Anthony Laforge, Google Chrome program manager, noting that the build is focused on fixing a few security issues in the browser. Google Chrome to 4.0.249.89 marks a first for the Mountain View-based search giant, as it is the first build of the open source browser for which the company rewards a third-party security researcher which submitted a problem he discovered independently of the company.
“Congratulations to Timothy D. Morgan on receiving a Chromium Security Reward for bug 32718. Note that Timothy elected to donate the reward to the Haiti relief effort, so Google raised the donation to $1337,” Laforge stated.
At the end of January 2010, Google announced that it was kicking off a program designed to offer financial incentives to security experts which contribute to making Chromium safer. Chromium is the underlying open source project at the basis of the Chrome browser.
“We are introducing an experimental new incentive for external researchers to participate. We will be rewarding select interesting and original vulnerabilities reported to us by the security research community. For existing contributors to Chromium security — who would likely continue to contribute regardless — this may be seen as a token of our appreciation,” Chris Evans, Google Chrome Security, said at the time.
“As per Mozilla, our base reward for eligible bugs is $500. If the panel finds a particular bug particularly severe or particularly clever, we envisage rewards of $1337,” he added. Google Chrome Build 4.0.249.89 is designed to repair no less than six security issues: “DNS and fall-back behavior of proxies. Integer overflows in the v8 engine. Error processing <ruby> tag. Leak of redirection target via <iframe> href. Domain confusion populating HTTP authentication dialog. Integer overflow deserializing sandbox message,” Evans further mentioned.
Google Chrome 4.0.249.89 Stable for Windows is available for download here.