Google announces $2.7mn bounty for hacking Chrome OS

Google has reportedly announced a whopping 2.7 million dollars bounty if security experts are able to hack its Chrome browser-based OS at the Pwnium 4 hacking contest.

This year at the Pwnium 4, researchers would be allowed to choose between Intel- or ARM-powered laptops, while last year, they had to try to crack a Chromebook with an Intel processor.

According to PC World, hackers would be paid prizes of 110,000 dollars and 150,000 dollars for exploiting the Chrome OS, and the highest bounty would be rewarded to those who deliver an exploit able to persistently compromise a Hewlett-Packard or Acer Chromebook.

Last year Google put 3.14159 million dollars in the contest, but paid out just 40,000 dollars to a prolific hacker who goes by "Pinkie Pie," the contest's sole participant, for what Google later called a partial exploit.

Google said that it would consider larger bonuses to researchers who demonstrated a "particularly impressive or surprising exploit," like one that could circumvent kASLR, a new variant of the better-known ASLR anti-exploit technology used by Apple, Microsoft and Chrome OS.

The report said that for hackers to qualify for the prizes or bonuses, they must provide functional exploit code and details on all the vulnerabilities put into play.

Pwnium 4 is scheduled to take place on March 12 at the Canadian Security conference.