"Carpet-bombing" Flaw Discovered in Chrome

Earlier this year, security researchers found a so-called "carpet bombing" flaw in Apple's Safari browser, where visiting a malicious site could result in a bombardment of downloads to the user's desktop. As ReadWriteWeb reports, this same old security vulnerability has cropped up in Google's new Chrome Web browser.

ReadWriteWeb explains that "after a user double-clicks the download at the bottom of the screen [where Chrome displays files once they have been downloaded], this application is opened without any warning, which would allow a malicious hacker to easily execute any Java program on a user's machine." Yikes.

Safari and Chrome are cousins, as both use the open-source WebKit browser engine at their core. Apple, however, already issued a fix to this problem in June with the release of Safari 3.1.2, two months after the bug was first discovered. In Safari 3.1.2, the program asks you to confirm that you want to download files; prior to that, Safari would download files without a warning.

This bug has been around for a while and I'm a little surprised that it slipped through the cracks and made it into the public release of Chrome. Apparently, though, Google uses a slightly older version of WebKit in Chrome--one still affected by this bug.

Aviv Raff has more information on this bug, and links to a demonstration of how the flaw works.

As always, surf safely, everyone!

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