Firefox and Chrome tighten security in advance of the Pwn2Own 2011 hacking contest

Firefox and Chrome tighten security in advance of the Pwn2Own 2011 hacking contest

As the Pwn2Own contest gets closer, browser vendors are toughening up their browsers for the upcoming onslaught. Recent releases of the Firefox 3.5.17 and 3.6.14, and Thunderbird 3.1.8 have patched a number of vulnerabilities in the browsers that could have been exploited during the contest.

These updates fix a number of issues in the browser, ranging from Cross-site request forgery risks from plug-ins to errors in the JSON.stringify code. Even so crashes of the browser seem to have gone up since the update. Firefox beta on the other hand look surprisingly good according to the graph

This comes just a little while after Google patched a number of vulnerabilities in its own Chrome browser, in advance of the competition. A total of $125,000 are at stake this year out of which $20,000 comes from Google themselves, for those who can “best” the Google Chrome browser.