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Google releases notes on Chrome security fixes
Critical-risk vulnerabilities patched

By Stephen Shankland

Published: Tuesday 09 September 2008

Google has revealed details of two critical-risk vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser and some lesser issues it says are now fixed.

The critical patches relate to buffer overrun vulnerabilities that could have let a remote attacker execute arbitrary software on a Chrome user's computer, said Mark Larson, a Google Chrome programme manager, in a mailing list posting yesterday.

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The first patch fixed a vulnerability in handling long file names, called the SaveAs vulnerability, and the second a vulnerability in dealing with the website addresses displayed in Chrome's status area when the user hovers over a link.

Larson also established a Google Chrome Releases blog for announcements and release notes relating to Chrome. The company had said earlier it was working on a way to release that information, in part after people requested such notes well after Google started automatically updating Chrome browsers without saying exactly what was in the update.

Google also fixed two lesser security issues. First was an issue where typing "about:%" in the address bar could crash the computer. The problem also meant a web page with that text as a hyperlink could crash the browser if a user hovered the mouse pointer over the link. Second was to prevent the user's desktop from being the default download directory to mitigate "the risk of malicious cluttering of the desktop with unwanted downloads, which can lead to executing unwanted files", Larson said.

Other fixes addressed non-security issues: a JavaScript problem with Facebook; a problem suggesting search terms while using various websites; and some data-transfer issues with the Safe Browsing mode.