Google Patches Chrome zero-day actively exploited

Google this week addressed 14 vulnerabilities in the Chrome browser, including a zero-day flaw that has been exploited in the wild.

Google released security updates to address 14 vulnerabilities in the Chrome browser, including a zero-day issue that has been exploited in the wild.

The most severe of these flaws, tracked as CVE-2021-30544, is a critical use-after-free issue that impacts BFCache.

A back/forward cache (bfcache) caches whole pages (including the JavaScript heap) when navigating away from a page, so that the full state of the page can be restored when the user navigates back. Think of it as pausing a page when you leave it and playing it when you return.

Google awarded $25,000 researchers Rong Jian and Guang Gong from 360 Alpha Lab for reporting this vulnerability.

Google released updates to fix six high-severity use-after-free flaws in Extensions, Autofill, Loader, Spell check, Accessibility, and V8, and a high-severity out-of-bounds write vulnerability in ANGLE.

One of these flaws, a zero-day Type Confusion issue in the V8 Javascript engine, tracked as CVE-2021-30551, is already being exploited in attacks in the wild.

“Google is aware that an exploit for CVE-2021-30551 exists in the wild.” reads the post published by Google.

Shane Huntley, director of Google’s Threat Analysis Group, revealed that a “commercial exploit company providing capability for limited nation-state Eastern Europe/Middle East targeting” has developed an exploit for the CVE-2021-30551.

It seems that the same commercial exploit company has also developed an exploit for a critical RCE, tracked as CVE-2021-33742, in the Windows MSHTML platform.

Since the beginning of 2021, Google addressed other zero-day vulnerabilities in Chrome:

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Google Chrome)