At last week’s CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, Canada, the Linux-based Chrome operating system (OS) defied all attempts to break it. It was part of a Google’s (News - Alert) hacking competition called Pwnium. SBWire.com reported that although the Chrome Web browser on Windows was breakable, its little cousin Chrome OS also proved to be essentially unbreakable at the conference.

As per the report, there was another security contest at the conference, organized by HP’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI). It was called the Pwn2own competition in which Microsoft's (News - Alert) IE 10, Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox Web browsers were all cracked in addition to Java.Google is offering a total prize package of $3.14 million for its own Pwnium 3 Chrome OS cracking contest. The prizes being offered for this competition are as follows:

• $110,000 for browser or system-level compromise in guest mode or as a logged-in user delivered via a Web page
• $150,000 for compromise with device persistence or guest to guest with interim reboot delivered via a Web page

In addition, the software giant is offering multiple prizes for each crack up to a maximum of $3.14 million for all winners.

The report further indicates that the winning attacks had to "be demonstrated against a base (Wi-Fi) model of the Samsung (News - Alert) Series 5 550 Chromebook running the latest stable version of Chrome OS. Any installed software (including the kernel and drivers, etc) may be used to crack the OS.

According to Chris Evans, the tech leader of the Google Chrome security team, "Security is one of the core tenets of Chrome, but no software is perfect, and security bugs slip through even the best development and review processes. That's why we've continued to engage with the security research community to help us find and fix vulnerabilities." Before the contest, Google released ten Chrome browser security fixes. Despite a big prize, crackers were unsuccessful in breaking the Linux-based Chrome OS code. To give the crackers more time, the competition deadline was extended. But, there were no winning entries, Google said. However, the company is evaluating some work that may qualify as partial exploits according to officials.

In essence, findings conclude that Chrome OS and Linux remain the best choice for security-conscious desktop users.