Google engineers have denied Vupen’s claim of a Chrome vulnerability. They state it’s an Adobe Flash problem. The Chrome browser comes bundled with Adobe Flash.

"Vupen misunderstood how sandboxing worked in Chrome, and only had a Flash bug. It's a legit pwn, but if it requires Flash, it's not a Chrome pwn," tweeted Chris Evans, a Google security engineer and Chrome team lead.

"We will not help Google in finding the vulnerabilities," said Chaouki Bekrar, Vupen's CEO and head of research, in an email reply to questions. "Nobody knows how we bypassed Google Chrome's sandbox except us and our customers, and any claim is a pure speculation." – Computer World

Bekrar refused to reveal the information to Google stating they only do that for customers (viz. “pay to play”)

"The Flash sandbox blog post went to pains to call it an initial step," said Evans. "It protects some stuff, more to come. Flash sandbox (does not equal) Chrome sandbox."

The blog Evans referred to was published in December 2010, where Schuh and another Google developer, Carlos Pizano said, "While we've laid a tremendous amount of groundwork in this initial sandbox, there's still more work to be done."

Chrome’s sandbox is present only in the Windows version. Bekrar also wrote, "Chrome's built-in plug-ins such as Flash are launched inside the sandbox which was created by Google, so finding and exploiting a Flash or a WebKit vulnerability will fall inside the sandboxes and will not circumvent it. A sandbox bypass exploit is still required."

This is the critical point, because Chrome is a ‘secure’ browser because of it’s sandboxing technology. In the “Pwn2Own” contest, Google offered a $20,000 prize to the hacker who could break it, but no one took it on. That’s not the same as ‘everyone tried, but couldn’t do it’.

I guess Bekrar figures his researchers’ work is worth a far more lucrative contract with Google. I also think he’s probably right.

Source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9216627/Google_engineers_deny_Chrome_hack_exploited_browser_s_code?taxonomyId=17&pageNumber=2