Google now pays more for disclosing vulnerabilities in Chrome OS and some Play Store apps

One of the hardest aspects of maintaining a cross-platform product is ensuring its security. Vulnerabilities can be exploited on various platforms in various scenarios, and it’s almost impossible for literally any company’s security department to fix all of them on their own. That’s why companies often use vulnerability disclosure rewards programs, which basically means giving money to someone who finds an issue in your product. Google has several programs of this kind. One of them is the Chrome Vulnerability Rewards Program, which awards security researchers for exploiting vulnerabilities in Chromium, Chrome, and Chrome OS. As you already know, there are a lot of Chromium-based browsers on the market, so the security of this product is crucial.

Today, Google is increasing the minimum rewarding amount for this program. Currently, security researchers receive a maximum amount of $5,000 on baseline reports. These exploits are mostly around escaping the sandboxing. Google is tripling the amount of reward for high severity baseline reward, bringing it up to $15,000. The price of high-quality reports with functional exploits of the same category got doubled. Previously it was $15,000, but after today Google will pay $30,000 for these kinds of exploits. Google is also increasing the bonus from $500 to $1,000 for exploits found via Chrome Fuzzer, which lets security researchers use Google’s hardware and scale to replicate the exploits.

The Google Play Security Reward Program got an update, too. This program only covers apps that have specifically opted-in.

- The reward for remote code execution bug went from $5,000 to $20,000
- The reward for theft of insecure private data went from $1,000 to $3,000
- The reward for accessing protected app components went from $1,000 to $3,000

To put it in short, Google decided to show more appreciation for all the security researchers that help ensure the security of their product. The changes will go into action today. You can start looking for vulnerabilities if you are competent enough. Maybe you’ll get some reward from Google.