Chrome rolls out new protections preventing password and data theft

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Google is temporarily increasing the rewards it pays for hacks that exploit holes in a beefed-up security protection that debuted in desktop versions of Chrome last month. Chrome for Android, meanwhile, is receiving a slimmed-down version of the same protection.

For a limited time, Google will boost its normal bounty amounts for exploits that allow one site the browser is interacting with to steal passwords or other sensitive data from another accessed site. Google is also broadening its vulnerability reward program to include bugs in Blink-the core software that Chrome uses to render HTML and other resources-that allow similar types of cross-site data thefts.

Fortress of solitude

The changes come a month after the release of Chrome 77, which quietly strengthened an existing protection known as site isolation. Google developers first added site isolation in July 2018 in a highly ambitious engineering feat that required major architectural changes to the way the browser worked under the hood.

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