Bigger Rewards for Security Bugs

Posted by Natasha Pabrai and Andrew Whalley, Chrome Security Team

Chrome has always been built with security at its core, by a passionate worldwide community as part of the Chromium open source project. We're proud that community includes world class security researchers who help defend Chrome, and other Chromium based browsers.

Back in 2010 we created the Chrome Vulnerability Rewards Program which provides cash rewards to researchers for finding and reporting security bugs that help keep our users safe. Since its inception the program has received over 8,500 reports and paid out over five million dollars! A big thank you to every one of the researchers - it's an honor working with you.

Over the years we've expanded the program, including rewarding full chain exploits on Chrome OS, and the Chrome Fuzzer Program, where we run researchers' fuzzers on thousands of Google cores and automatically submit bugs they find for reward.

Today, we're delighted to announce an across the board increase in our reward amounts! Full details can be found on our program rules page but highlights include tripling the maximum baseline reward amount from $5,000 to $15,000 and doubling the maximum reward amount for high quality reports from $15,000 to $30,000. The additional bonus given to bugs found by fuzzers running under Chrome Fuzzer Program is also doubling to $1,000.

We've also clarified what we consider a high quality report, to help reporters get the highest possible reward, and we've updated the bug categories to better reflect the types of bugs that are reported and that we are most interested in.

But that's not all! On Chrome OS we're increasing our standing reward to $150,000 for exploit chains that can compromise a Chromebook or Chromebox with persistence in guest mode. Security bug in firmware and lock screen bypasses also get their own reward categories.

These new reward amounts will apply to bugs submitted after today on the Chromium bug tracker using the Security template. As always, see the Chrome Vulnerability Reward Program Rules for full details about the program.

In other news, our friends over at the Google Play Security Reward Program have increased their rewards for remote code execution bugs from $5,000 to $20,000, theft of insecure private data from $1,000 to $3,000, and access to protected app components from $1,000 to $3,000. The Google Play Security Reward Program also pays bonus rewards for responsibly disclosing vulnerabilities to participating app developers. Check out the program to learn more and see which apps are in scope.

Happy bug hunting!