Mobile Pwn2Own Offering $300K In Prizes Money

The second annual Mobile Pwn2Own contest will take place in Tokyo Japan on Nov. 13-14, TippingPoint announced on its company blog today. This year's event will offer participants up to $300,000 in prize money for those researchers who can successfully demonstrate attacks against mobile services and browsers.

This year’s Mobile Pwn2Own contest is offering the following prizes in the following categories: 

• Short Distance/Physical Access ($50,000), either:
  • Bluetooth, or
  • Wi-Fi, or
  • Universal Serial Bus (USB), or
  • Near Field Communication (NFC)
• Mobile Web Browser ($40,000)
• Mobile Application/Operating System ($40,000)
• Messaging Services ($70,000), either:
  • Short Message Service (SMS), or
  • Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), or
  • Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS)
• Baseband ($100,000)

Contestants are allowed to select the target they wish to compromise during the pre-registration process.  The exact OS version, firmware and model numbers will be coordinated with the pre-registered contestants. The following targets are available for selection:

• Nokia Lumia 1020 running Windows Phone
• Microsoft Surface RT running Windows RT
• Samsung Galaxy S4 running Android
• Apple iPhone 5 running iOS
• Apple iPad Mini running iOS
• Google Nexus 4 running Android
• Google Nexus 7 running Android
• Google Nexus 10 running Android
• BlackBerry Z10 running BlackBerry 10

 In addition Google’s Chrome Security Team, in conjunction with the Chrome on Android team, is sponsoring a top-up reward for the Mobile Web Browser category. If a contestant successfully compromises Chrome on Android, either on Google Nexus 4 or Samsung Galaxy S4, the prize amount will be bumped by $10k to make it a total of $50,000.  There may be additional winners in the Mobile Web Browser category if the contestant is specifically targeting Chrome on Android, either on the Google Nexus 4 or Samsung Galaxy S4.

For those looking to enter the full contest rules are listed here. For those geeks that want to stay updated on the contest ZDI will be tweeting regular updates and news on Mobile Pwn2Own up to and during the contest. You can follow them at @thezdi on Twitter or search for the hash tag #pwn2own.