$1 Million Sandbox Challenge Uncovers Linux Kernel Flaws
Vercel's $1M sandbox challenge surfaced two Linux kernel networking defects—one leaking host kernel memory, one crashing hosts—with CVEs pending.
Vercel ran a two-week, $1 million sandbox escape challenge (Aug 18–Sep 1) on its Firecracker-based microVM sandbox, receiving 1,285 reports and committing ~$325k in payouts (1 Critical, 7 High, 15 Medium, 49 Low validated so far). No attacker accessed real customer data. The most important filing found two independent Linux kernel networking stack defects—one leaks host kernel memory, the other deterministically crashes the host—with wide implications for cloud providers isolating workloads via the same kernel layer. Fixes are under private review with CVEs pending; Vercel also plans to open-source its agentic report-triage agent built on the Eve framework running Kimi K3.