Google patches 6 serious Chrome bugs

Google on Thursday patched six vulnerabilities in Chrome, and as usual, silently updated users' copies of the browser.

The update to Chrome 10.0.648.204 also included two more blacklisted SSL certificates that may be related to last week's theft of nine digital certificates from a Comodo reseller.

Google's second-most-serious ranking in its threat scoring system. Of the half-dozen bugs, two were "use after free" flaws -- a type of memory management bug that can be exploited to inject attack code -- while a second pair were pegged by Google as "stale pointer" vulnerabilities, another kind of memory allocation flaw.

As is Google's practice, the company locked down its bug-tracking database, blocking access to the technical details of the patched vulnerabilities. Google usually unlocks the bug entries several weeks, sometimes months later, to give users time to update before the information goes public.

Google paid out $8,500 in bounties to three different researchers for finding and reporting the six vulnerabilities. So far this year, Google has cut bounty checks totaling $58,145.

Frequent-contributor Sergey Glazunov took home $7,000 for reporting four of the bugs patched Thursday, bringing his 2011 bounty total to $20,634. Glazunov has become the most prolific of the independent researchers who specialize in rooting out Chrome flaws, reporting 14 of the 54 bugs attributed to outsiders.

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