Google’s latest version of its browser, Chrome 86, is now being rolled out with 35 security fixes – including a critical bug – and a feature that checks if users have any compromised passwords.

As of Tuesday, Chrome 86 is being promoted to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux and will roll out over the coming days. The versions of the browser for Android and iOS were also released Tuesday, and will become available on Google Play and the App Store this week.

Included in the newest browser version is a critical flaw (CVE-2020-15967) existing in Chrome’s payments component. The flaw, reported by Man Yue Mo of GitHub Security Lab, is a use-after-free vulnerability. Use after free is a memory-corruption flaw where an attempt is made to access memory after it has been freed. This can cause an array of malicious impacts, from causing a program to crash, to potentially leading to execution of arbitrary code.

Use-after-free bugs have plagued Google Chrome in the past year. In fact, all seven high-severity vulnerabilities fixed by Google in Chrome 86 were use-after-free flaws – ranging from ones affecting Chrome’s printing (CVE-2020-15971), audio (CVE-2020-15972), password manager (CVE-2020-15991) and WebRTC (CVE-2020-15969) components (WebRTC is a protocol for rich-media web communication).

Further details of the bugs are not yet available, as “access to bug details and links may be kept restricted until a majority of users are updated with a fix,” according to Google’s Tuesday post.

Password Check

The Android and iOS versions of Chrome 86 will also come with a new security feature, which will send a copy of user’s usernames and passwords using a “special form of encryption.” That then lets Google check them against list of passwords known to be compromised.

“Passwords are often the first line of defense for our digital lives,” Abdel Karim Mardini, senior product manager with Chrome, said in a Tuesday post. “Today, we’re improving password security on both Android and iOS devices by telling you if the passwords you’ve asked Chrome to remember have been compromised, and if so, how to fix them.”

At the back end, when Google detects a username and password exposed by a data breach, it stores a strongly hashed and encrypted copy of the data. Then, when Chrome users log into a website, the feature sends a strongly hashed and encrypted version of their username and password to Google – meaning the company never derives usernames or passwords from the encrypted copy, it said.

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