Native Client Security Contest: The results are in!

A few months ago, we challenged you to discover exploits in the Native Client system and more than 600 of you decided to take us up on our invitation. We're very pleased with the results: participants found bugs that enabled some really clever exploits, but nothing that pointed to a fundamental flaw in the design of Native Client. Our judges reviewed all entries very carefully and have selected five teams as the winners of the Native Client Security Contest.

The big winner of the contest was the team "Beached As", consisting of IBM researcher Mark Dowd and independent researcher Ben Hawkes. "Beached As" reported 12 valid issues, including vulnerabilities in the validator and multiple type-confusion attacks. The team "CJETM" (Chris Rohlf, Jason Carpenter, Eric Monti — all security professionals with Matasano Security) came in second by reporting three issues with a common theme of memory related defects, including an uninitialized vtable entry, an exception condition during new(), and a double delete bug. Gabriel Campana from Sogeti ESEC R&D Labs was selected as the third place, while for the fourth and fifth place we had a tie between independent researcher Daiki Fukumori and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute student Alex Radocea. You can find a listing of all the issues the teams submitted at the Native Client Security Contest site.

The winners of the Native Client Security Contest, Team "Beached As"
Mark Dowd (left) and Ben Hawkes (right)

Winning teams were attracted to the contest by the potential of the Native Client technology. Mark Dowd, member of the winning team "Beached As", commented, "When I saw the press release announcing the product, I was intrigued by some of the ideas mentioned in the article. After reviewing the architecture a little, I thought the project adopted a novel approach to solving the problem of running native code securely, and was keen to take a closer look." Curiosity about what the technology could achieve also motivated the CJETM team, according to Chris Rohlf.

The real-world relevance of Native Client made this contest more interesting and challenging for participants. Contestant Alex Radocea stated, "Unlike most security challenges out there, the set of problems were not crafted. The tasks at hand were real and complex, as the real world is. I have no doubt that many unknown people eyed the code or attacked the applications and, frustratingly, found absolutely nothing wrong." Mark Dowd agreed: "Our goal was to create a convincing lead, to try and take the victory, and I think we did that. Having said that, the field was not soft. There were some tough contestants who were able to uncover a variety of interesting vulnerabilities."

We would like to thank all the contestants, the jury chair Ed Felten and all the security experts that judged the contest for helping us improve the security of our system. This contest helped us discover implementation errors in Native Client and some areas of our codebase we need to spend more time reviewing. More importantly, that no major architectural flaws were found provides evidence that Native Client can be made safe enough for widespread use. Toward that end, we're implementing additional security measures, such as an outer sandbox, but you can help by continuing to file bugs in Native Client. Community support and scrutiny has helped and will continue to help make Native Client more useful and more secure.

By Henry Bridge and Brad Chen, Native Client Team