The End of Pwn2Own 2009: Web Browsers Including Apple Safari were Hacked and Smartphones and Google Chrome Remained Unbroken

The third annual Pwn2Own security competition that was held at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, Canada has come to an end on 20th March 2009, i.e. Friday and revealed the weaknesses and loopholes of all the popular web browsers. This competition was intended to offer the white hat hackers a chance to crack the codes of popular web browsers including Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Apple Safari and the codes of popular smartphone operating systems.

The results are quite amazing, something that wasn’t expected. The Google Chrome and all the smartphones remained un-cracked but the Apple Safari, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox were easily hacked multiple times. Apple Safari was hacked by Charlie Miller in just a couple of seconds. This was followed by a 25 year old computer science student named Nils who demonstrated the vulnerabilities of Safari, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox.

The contestants also tried their tricks on Google Chrome browser and BlackBerry, Android, iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile smartphones but failed to break into the codes of these applications. According to the TippingPoint Technologies, the sponsor of the event, the Apple iPhone 3G could be hacked using one of the Safari exploits that was already used but according to the contest rules the same bug cannot be used twice.

The results clearly reveal that the smartphone OSes are far more secure than web browsers, except Google Chrome. This definitely brings the Chrome on the top of other web browsers and is expected to outshine its rivalries in near future in terms of market share, popularity and reliability.