The Pwnium hacking competition that Google every year for one day at a major security conference no longer exists.
However, the good news is that the company has decided not only to maintain the purpose of the project, but to fund it with an unlimited amount of money, all year round.
The competition was held annually at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, Canada, and allowed skilled hackers to showcase the exploits they found for Chrome.
In 2014, the prize was $1,000,000 / €890,000. Participants had to register and be present at the conference in order to enter the competition.
According to the new decision made by Google, this is no longer necessary, and most importantly, security researchers from all over the world now have the opportunity to submit their exploits, without being limited by a registration process, traveling, or facing any unexpected problems.
Submissions can be made to the Chrome Vulnerability Program (VRP) whenever they are ready.
Tim Willis of the Chrome Security team says the new system also addresses the risk that two or more researchers made the same discovery and simply waited, leaving Google customers exposed until the exploit was revealed.
The new model eliminates these risks and forces researchers to focus their efforts on different flaws in the event of a bug collision. It also allows Google to develop fixes for vulnerabilities faster.
Another reason for the changes was that hackersalso wanted to be able to report their findings throughout the year.
In short, the Chrome VRP now accepts bugs that would normally be reserved for the Pwnium contest, and this increases the final reward to $50,000 / €44,500.
