How we chained three vulnerabilities into a full Chrome exploit in just 6 days—claiming Google’s first $250,000 full-chain reward of 2026 for an attack affecting an estimated 1 billion users. 🧵
1/ Instead of asking one agent to produce an exploit end to end, we split the work into parallel campaigns: broad vulnerability search, V8 memory corruption, a V8 sandbox escape, a renderer sandbox escape, and integration.
2/ AI agents using OpenAI’s gpt-5.6-sol model searched source code, tested hypotheses, built proofs of concept, and developed exploit stages. Reconstructing usage from the archived Codex logs puts the six-day campaign at roughly $40,000 in API charges.
3/ The chain crossed two sandbox boundaries in three vulnerability stages:
1. Maglev reused a mutable boxed number during deoptimization
2. Animated WebP combined cached geometry with changed image bytes
3. Crashpad trusted a failed read from a supposedly frozen renderer
4/ Stage 1, Mutating the Immutable: the vulnerable Maglev path made a mutable number look like exactly the sort of immutable constant the compiler was allowed to reuse—giving reliable memory access from JavaScript throughout the V8 sandbox.
5/ Stage 2, Two WebPs Diverged in a V8 Cage: we made a conscious decision to avoid attacking the sandbox itself. Both WebPs were valid on their own—the unsafe state existed only because Blink combined A's cached geometry with B's current bytes.