Pwn2Own is the world’s most advanced conference focusing on applied digital security. In its first session, the best hackers of the world have tried to hack all of the most famous browsers, trying to breach in through their vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
Among the browsers that have been tested, you can find Safari on iPhone, Safari 4 on Mac Os X, Mozilla Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7, and Chrome. Here is a brief summary of the results:
- The security researchers Vincenzo Iozzo and Ralf Philipp Weinmann managed to “hack” the protections of the iPhone through Safari in just 20 seconds. To do it they used an exploit that is integrated in a web page and, when you open this page, the hacker will be able to send to a remote server all the text messages in the device memory.
- For the IE8 and Firefox 3 on Windows 7, the hacker, have used different exploits that allow the intruder to bypass, in both cases, the ASLR e DEP protections.
- The only browser that has not succumbed to the efforts of professionals is Google Chrome 4. They said that’s because of his architecture based on sandbox that prevents the execution of code that can change the system, or access sensitive data.
So, is Google Chrome really climbing its way to the top? This is a question that we are willing to know the answer for, but who knows?!
Don’t know why but I did not except Chrome to be the most safest around but I guess I was wrong. What about Opera?
Hi Sandrina,
I use both, chrome and opera. I think they are two of the best web browser for windows machine.
Opera has not been brought to the attention of Pwn2Own’s hacker teams.
Giova.