Pwn2Own 2017: the results of the tenth hacker competition

This year, the tenth Pwn2Own hacker competition, held by the Zero Day Initiative , has already been held. Every year the authors of Habr also talk about the competition, but this year for some reason this did not happen. Therefore, we, Kingservers , are correcting this omission. So, this year the prize fund of the competition was a record $ 1 million. Participants were invited to show their skills in five main categories.

These include hacking virtual machines (VMware Workstation and Microsoft Hyper-V), hacking browsers and plug-ins for them (Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Flash Player for Edge), elevation of privileges (Microsoft Windows, macOS and desktop version of Ubuntu ), hacking into different types of corporate applications (Adobe Reader, Word, Excel and PowerPoint) and hacking servers (Apache Web Server under Ubuntu). I must say that the participants managed a lot, the competition was very interesting.

On the first day, two independent teams managed to crack the Adobe Reader. After that, with the help of several vulnerabilities in the Windows OS kernel, experts elevated privileges, gaining the highest level of access. By the way, both teams were from China - generally speaking, the Chinese showed themselves at this competition just fine. The first team, 360 Security, received $ 50,000 for achieving the goal, the second, Tencent - two times less.
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The other two teams managed to hack the Safari browser. The first distinguished team led by Samuel Groß and Niklas Baumstark. The second team of Chaitin Technology (China) also achieved the goal. Both teams of participants worked with vulnerabilities that opened up the possibility of executing third-party code with superuser rights on macOS. Following the results of hacking this browser, the first team received $ 28 thousand (they managed to fulfill the goal only partially, having achieved the output of a message on the touch panel of the new MacBook Pro), the second - $ 35 thousand.



In hacking Microsoft Edge, which is considered one of the most resistant to hacking browsers due to the presence of a sandbox, the Chinese from Tencent also distinguished themselves. They received for the implementation of the goal already $ 80,000, since these specialists managed to go beyond the sandbox.

By the way, Microsoft Edge has become one of the most cracked browsers in the competition, it was possible to overcome its protection five times. On the third day of the event, Microsoft Edge was hacked again by cybersecurity expert Richard Zhu, who received $ 55,000 for his achievement.

Safari browser yielded to the contestants four times, Firefox - once, Google Chrome tried to hack, but did not have enough time.

Tencent compatriots, the Chaitin team, received another $ 15,000 for success in an attack using kernel privilege escalation in the desktop version of Ubuntu OS 16.10. The Chinese showed hacking using vulnerabilities in the Linux 4.8 kernel (it is used in the named distribution). Initially, the attacker had only basic user access, but in the end he managed to get root-rights. Canonical have already announced the found vulnerability.

The largest prize was the amount of $ 105,000, which was received by representatives of the Qihoo 360 team. They managed to hack the protection of VMware Workstation. The Chinese started with the Microsoft Edge compromise, then switched to the Windows kernel, and then reached the goal. Team Sniper also managed to overcome the barrier between the virtual machine and the host OS.

According to the results of the competition came forward the Chinese. The first place with the maximum number of points was given to the Qihoo 360 team. The second and third place went to the teams of Tencent Team Sniper and Chaitin Technology, respectively.

Companies whose software has been hacked, quickly release patches. So, Mozilla last Friday introduced Firefox 52.0.1 with eliminated vulnerability.