It seems that the hackers would have a tough challenge at Pwn2Own 2012 for winning the reward of $1 million for hacking the Google Chrome. Just before the event, Google has shipped an update for the stable version of Chrome, v17.0.963.65, which fixes 14 high-risk bugs. Google paid $17,500 to the independent developers for reporting these bugs. Moreover, additional $30,000 was awarded to three other researchers for discovering some special bugs.

Google wants Chrome to be proved as the most secure browser in Pwn2Own 2012, and this update fixes several bugs like out-of-bounds read in text handling, Use-after-free in various cases etc. Google says that the most of these bugs were detected using its memory error detection tool AddressSanitizer. The AddressSanitizer finds use-after-free and out-of-bound bugs in C/C++ programs including Chrome.

Chrome 17.0.963.65 has been released for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame platforms, and existing installations will update automatically. Along with this update, Chromebook Dev Channel has also got an update today. This update brings support for new file formats (rar, tar, tar.gz, and tar.bz2) and new full-screen video & audio player on Chromebooks.