Chrome update closes holes and fixes mouse wheel issues

Google has released Chrome 24.0.1312.56 to the stable update channel of the open source browser. The new update closes five security holes, three of which are high severity, and fixes problems with mouse wheel scrolling.

Atte Kettunen of the Oulu University Secure Programming Group in Finland received $1000 for the discovery of a high severity use-after-free vulnerability in the font handling of the HTML5 canvas. Ted Nakamura of the Chromium development community found a Mac OS X-only crash problem with unsupported RTC sampling rates, also rated with a high severity. The last of the high-severity-rated holes, an unchecked array in Chrome's content blocking, was fixed by the Chrome Security Team. Two medium severity issues were also fixed.

The mouse wheel scrolling problem fixed in this update concerned situations where the browser would scroll one pixel per mouse wheel interaction when it was actually set to scroll one screen at a time. Install problems for multiple user setups under Windows when Chrome was installed with administrator privileges have also been remedied.

Chrome 24.0.1312.56 is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and as the Chrome Frame plugin for Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. All versions of Chrome should update themselves automatically; on some mobile platforms the user will be prompted to perform the update. Chrome is built from the open source Chromium browser project run by Google.

(fab)