Google patches CVE-2026-85046, the sixth exploited Chrome zero-day of 2026

Google released a Chrome Stable channel update on 3 September 2026 carrying 12 security fixes. One of them, CVE-2026-85046, is a type confusion vulnerability in V8, the engine Chrome uses to compile and run JavaScript and WebAssembly. Google rates it High and says an exploit for it already exists in the wild.

The patched builds are 152.0.7977.82 and 152.0.7977.83 for Windows and macOS, and 152.0.7977.82 for Linux. As always, the rollout is staged over days rather than pushed to everyone at once.

Google has said nothing about who is exploiting the bug, who was targeted, or how the attacks work. That silence is deliberate. Per the Chrome Releases advisory, bug details stay restricted until most users are patched, which also buys time for other Chromium-based projects to catch up.

• 12 security fixes in total: 10 rated High, 2 rated Medium.
• Reported by Salvatore Gulizia (Serotav) on 4 August 2026 for a $1,000 bounty.
• Google states only that an exploit exists in the wild, with no attribution.

Type confusion is a memory-safety weakness, catalogued as CWE-843, where code treats an object in memory as a different type than it really is. In a JavaScript engine that matters more than elsewhere, because the optimising compiler makes aggressive assumptions about how arrays and objects are laid out. Break those assumptions and you break the safety guarantees built on top of them.

The CVE record describes the outcome plainly: a remote attacker can execute arbitrary code inside the sandbox through a crafted HTML page. Public reporting from Help Net Security and Security Affairs puts the CVSS score at 8.8.

Gulizia's own write-up, cited by Help Net Security, traces the root cause to a compiler bug where an array holding PACKED_ELEMENTS ends up with a PACKED_SMI_ELEMENTS map. That mismatch can be turned into arbitrary read and write access on the JavaScript heap, which is the usual first step toward code execution.

One caveat worth keeping in view: execution lands inside Chrome's renderer sandbox. Getting out of it normally needs a second bug. No public source has confirmed a sandbox escape chained to this one.

The zero-day gets the headline, but nine other High-severity bugs shipped alongside it, several of them in components that also process untrusted web content. Two Medium issues round out the release. None of these is flagged as exploited. They still ship in the same binary, so patching once closes all 12.

High severity

• CVE-2026-85045: race condition in V8.
• CVE-2026-85048: use after free in Compositing.
• CVE-2026-85051: type confusion in Compositing.
• CVE-2026-85050: out-of-bounds write in WebGL.
• CVE-2026-85049: use after free in Skia.
• CVE-2026-85042: use after free in DevTools.
• CVE-2026-85053: improper resource exposure in CacheStorage.
• CVE-2026-85052: out-of-bounds read in CrashReporting.
• CVE-2026-85043: incomplete cleanup in Network.

Medium severity

• CVE-2026-85047: improper input validation in Transactions Platform.
• CVE-2026-85044: use of released resource in Mobile.

Every Chrome Stable installation below 152.0.7977.82 on Windows, macOS and Linux is exposed. That includes machines that downloaded the update but haven't restarted, which is a large share of any fleet on a Friday afternoon.

V8 is a Chromium component, so Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi and other Chromium-based browsers inherit the same code. Each vendor ships the fix on its own schedule in its own build. At the time of writing, no Microsoft advisory naming CVE-2026-85046 for Edge had been found, so treat Edge as pending and track the Edge security release notes rather than assuming coverage.

Embedded Chromium matters too. Electron apps, kiosk browsers and anything bundling a CEF runtime carry their own copy of V8 and won't be fixed by updating Chrome.

CISA added CVE-2026-85046 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 4 September 2026, one day after the patch shipped, describing it as a Google Chromium V8 type confusion vulnerability. The entry points agencies to Binding Operational Directive 26-04, which frames remediation around risk rather than a flat deadline for everything, and sets expectations for checking whether a system was already compromised before the patch landed.

Public reporting puts the federal remediation deadline at 18 September 2026, though at least one write-up cites 16 September. Verify the date against the KEV catalog entry itself before quoting it in a compliance report.

BOD 26-04 binds US federal civilian agencies only. For everyone else, a KEV listing this fast is still the clearest available signal that exploitation is real and not theoretical.

There's no workaround. The fix is the update, and the update only counts once Chrome restarts. Check the running version on a single machine first, then move to fleet-wide enforcement.

chrome://settings/help

Expected: 152.0.7977.82 or later (Windows, macOS, Linux)
          152.0.7977.83 also valid on Windows and macOS

1. Inventory current versions through your RMM or Intune and flag anything below 152.0.7977.82.
2. Force the rollout rather than waiting for the staged one. On Windows, the TargetVersionPrefix and update policies in the Chrome ADMX templates let you pin a minimum; on macOS, push through your MDM.
3. Make the restart happen. RelaunchNotificationPeriod with RelaunchNotification set to required gives users a deadline instead of an ignorable banner.
4. Rebuild golden images, VDI templates, CI containers and kiosk builds on the patched version.
5. Map every Chromium-based browser and embedded runtime in your inventory to its own vendor release, then track those separately.

CVE-2026-85046 is the sixth Chrome zero-day exploited in attacks that Google has patched in 2026. The run so far, per BleepingComputer and Security Affairs: CVE-2026-2441 in the CSS engine in February, CVE-2026-3909 in the Skia graphics library and CVE-2026-3910 in V8 in March, CVE-2026-5281 in Dawn (the WebGPU implementation) in April, and CVE-2026-11645 in V8 in June.

All six are memory-safety issues. Three of them sit in V8, which is the pattern worth noting: the JavaScript engine is the most reachable, most heavily optimised attack surface in the browser, and it's still written in C++.

The bounty is its own detail. Google paid $1,000 for this report, against $55,000 for the June V8 zero-day. Bounty size tracks the quality and novelty of the report, not the eventual real-world impact.

Three things are worth tracking over the next fortnight.

• Google's bug tracker entry (issue 542403045) stays restricted until most users are patched. When it opens, technical detail and any indicators follow, and so does the risk of public exploit code.
• Downstream vendor releases. Edge, Brave, Opera and Vivaldi advisories naming this CVE tell you when the rest of your browser estate is genuinely covered.
• Attribution. Google published nothing about the attackers. If this turns out to be commercial spyware or a targeted campaign, that usually surfaces later through Google TAG or a threat-intel vendor.

Any endpoint running Chrome below 152.0.7977.82 can be attacked by a web page that runs code inside the browser sandbox. Exploitation is confirmed by the vendor, so the exposure window is the time between the patch shipping and the browser restarting.

Security: A drive-by path onto managed endpoints through malvertising, watering holes or phishing links. Post-exploitation, in-sandbox access can reach session data and browser-held credentials depending on what else the attacker chains.

Privacy: Not established. No source has described victimology or what data was accessed in the observed attacks.

Google patched CVE-2026-85046, a type confusion bug in Chrome's V8 engine that attackers are already exploiting, in Chrome 152.0.7977.82/.83 on 3 September 2026. CISA added it to the KEV catalog a day later.