Description

Use after free in UI in Google Chrome prior to 152.0.7977.65 allowed a local attacker who had compromised the renderer process to execute arbitrary code outside the sandbox via a local program. (Chromium security severity: Medium)

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "7.7",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-25T21:18:18.887Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-25T21:18:18.887Z",
  "executiveSummary": "This vulnerability is a use-after-free (UAF) flaw residing within the user interface (UI) components of Google Chrome. The vulnerability allows a local attacker, who has already achieved initial compromise of the renderer process, to escape the browser sandbox and execute arbitrary code on the underlying host system.\nThe flaw affects versions of Google Chrome prior to 152.0.7977.65. Classified with a Chromium security severity of Medium, this vulnerability represents a significant risk to system integrity and confidentiality. By leveraging the initial renderer process compromise, an attacker can transition from a sandboxed environment to native code execution.\nThe exploitation of this vulnerability requires the attacker to have successfully exploited a secondary vulnerability to gain control of the renderer process. Once the renderer process is compromised, the attacker can manipulate the UI object lifecycle to trigger the use-after-free condition. This chain of exploitation effectively bypasses sandbox isolation mechanisms, leading to full system compromise from the context of the user running the browser. Patching to the specified version or higher is critical to remediating this sandbox escape vector.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability is rooted in a use-after-free condition within the Google Chrome UI stack. A use-after-free occurs when an application continues to use a pointer to a memory location after that memory has been deallocated or freed. In the context of the Chrome browser's UI framework, this involves the improper management of object lifecycles where a UI-related object is destroyed while a dangling pointer remains referenced elsewhere in the code path.\nThe attack flow begins with an attacker gaining control of the renderer process, typically through a separate browser-based exploit. Once the renderer process is compromised, the attacker gains the ability to execute arbitrary code within the sandboxed environment. From this vantage point, the attacker targets the UI communication or rendering logic. By manipulating the browser's internal state, the attacker forces the UI component to deallocate a specific object while simultaneously ensuring that a stale reference to that memory is still active.\nWhen the browser subsequently attempts to access the freed memory location, the attacker—having potentially performed heap grooming or spraying within the renderer—attempts to place malicious data or a controlled object into that vacated memory slot. This is often referred to as heap feng shui. If successful, the browser performs operations on the attacker-controlled data, interpreting it as a valid UI object. This dereferencing of the stale pointer leads to an invalid control flow or memory corruption.\nThe post-exploitation impact of this UAF is the elevation of privileges from the restricted renderer sandbox to the host environment. By controlling the data at the location of the dangling pointer, an attacker can influence function pointers or object vtables, thereby redirecting execution flow to arbitrary code (such as shellcode or a ROP chain). Because the UI process in Chrome often runs with higher privileges than the renderer process, successful exploitation allows the attacker to achieve code execution outside the sandbox, circumventing the browser's primary security boundary. This process does not require authentication from the victim, but it is strictly predicated on the ability to interact with the renderer process as a local attacker."
}