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Project Zero is a team of security analysts employed by Google tasked with finding zero-day vulnerabilities. [1] It was announced on 15 July 2014. [2]
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Project Zero is a team of security analysts employed by Google tasked with finding zero-day vulnerabilities. [1] It was announced on 15 July 2014. [2]
After finding a number of flaws in software used by many end-users while researching other problems, such as the critical "Heartbleed" vulnerability, Google decided to form a full-time team dedicated to finding such vulnerabilities, not only in Google software but any software used by its users. The new project was announced on 15 July 2014 on Google's security blog. [2] When it launched, one of the principal innovations that Project Zero provided was a strict 90-day disclosure deadline along with a publicly visible bugtracker where the vulnerability disclosure process is documented. [3]
While the idea for Project Zero can be traced back to 2010, its establishment fits into the larger trend of Google's counter-surveillance initiatives in the wake of the 2013 global surveillance disclosures by Edward Snowden. The team was formerly headed by Chris Evans, previously head of Google's Chrome security team, who subsequently joined Tesla Motors. [4] Other notable members include security researchers Ben Hawkes, Ian Beer and Tavis Ormandy. [5] Hawkes eventually became the team's manager and then resigned on 4 May 2022.
The team's focus is not just on finding bugs and novel attacks, but also on researching and publicly documenting how such flaws could be exploited in practice. This is done to ensure that defenders have sufficient understanding of attacks; the team keeps an extensive research blog with articles that describe individual attacks in detail. [6]
Bugs found by the Project Zero team are reported to the manufacturer and only made publicly visible once a patch has been released [2] or if 90 days have passed without a patch being released. [7] The 90-day-deadline is Google's way of implementing responsible disclosure, giving software companies 90 days to fix a problem before informing the public so that users themselves can take necessary steps to avoid attacks. [7] There have been cases where the vendor does not produce any solution for the discovered flaws within 90 days, before the public disclosure by the team, increasing the risk to already-vulnerable users. [8]
In the field of computer security, independent researchers often discover flaws in software that can be abused to cause unintended behaviour; these flaws are called vulnerabilities. The process by which the analysis of these vulnerabilities is shared with third parties is the subject of much debate, and is referred to as the researcher's disclosure policy. Full disclosure is the practice of publishing analysis of software vulnerabilities as early as possible, making the data accessible to everyone without restriction. The primary purpose of widely disseminating information about vulnerabilities is so that potential victims are as knowledgeable as those who attack them.
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A bug bounty program is a deal offered by many websites, organizations, and software developers by which individuals can receive recognition and compensation for reporting bugs, especially those pertaining to security exploits and vulnerabilities.
Heartbleed is a security bug in some outdated versions of the OpenSSL cryptography library, which is a widely used implementation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. It was introduced into the software in 2012 and publicly disclosed in April 2014. Heartbleed could be exploited regardless of whether the vulnerable OpenSSL instance is running as a TLS server or client. It resulted from improper input validation in the implementation of the TLS heartbeat extension. Thus, the bug's name derived from heartbeat. The vulnerability was classified as a buffer over-read, a situation where more data can be read than should be allowed.
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Benjamin Kunz Mejri is a German IT security specialist and penetration tester. His areas of research include vulnerabilities in computer systems, bug bounties, the security of e-payment payment services and privacy protection. Mejri is known for uncovering new zero-day vulnerabilities and making them transparent to the public.
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Ben Hawkes is a computer security expert and white hat hacker from New Zealand, previously employed by Google as manager of their Project Zero.
Ian Beer is a British computer security expert and white hat hacker, currently residing in Switzerland and working for Google as part of its Project Zero. He has been lauded by some as one of the best iOS hackers. Beer was the first security expert to publish his findings under the "Project Zero" name in the spring of 2014; at this time, the project was not yet revealed and crediting the newly discovered vulnerabilities to it led to some speculation.
This article provides a detailed chronological account of the historical reception and criticism of security and privacy features in the WhatsApp messaging service.
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Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) is a zero-day vulnerability in Log4j, a popular Java logging framework, involving arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability had existed unnoticed since 2013 and was privately disclosed to the Apache Software Foundation, of which Log4j is a project, by Chen Zhaojun of Alibaba Cloud's security team on 24 November 2021. Before an official CVE identifier was made available on 10 December 2021, the vulnerability circulated with the name "Log4Shell", given by Free Wortley of the LunaSec team, which was initially used to track the issue online. Apache gave Log4Shell a CVSS severity rating of 10, the highest available score. The exploit was simple to execute and is estimated to have had the potential to affect hundreds of millions of devices.
