Full Disclosure mailing list archives

Re: IE sp2 and Mozilla Firefox DoS.

From: Sebastian Dietz <dietz () dimecs de>
Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2004 00:52:16 +0100

I observed something different. I tried the following:

Generated a file like:

<html>
<head><title> (4MB from /dev/urandom)
</html> (or </title></html>)

on a gentoo linux kernel 2.6.9 FireFox 1.0 512MB Ram and FireFox started to use
up to 70% of the memory and about 4 CPU Minutes (1.4GHz Thunderbird) and then
displayed the page. (some in the title, the rest in the main window)

After switching to a new page, FireFox did not free the big chunk of memory,
but responded like normal. Actually I am writing this mail with this instance.
When closing FireFox the mem is freed of course. So I think this is not realy a
DoS against FireFox 1.0 on Linux, but a serious proplem for multi user
Systems.

ciao

Execute

On 27.12.2004 at 21:20:13, bipin gautam <visitbipin () yahoo com> wrote:

There is an issue with these browser rendering html's
with long titles. 
Only Tested on: 
-------------- 
Internet Explorer(SP2): 6.0.2900.2180 
Mozilla firefox: 1.0 

Not affected:
------------- 
Mozilla Browser 

Have a look at, 
___________________ 
<html> 
<head> <title>  ....(put)3.5 MB OF data....... 

</html> 
___________________
 

For IE beyond 1 Mb will just do fine. On execution,
Mozilla Firefox starts filling up all the available
system memory with 100% CPU use. 

Internet explorer renders 100% CPU use, but no system
instability. (O; 
I've tested it on Windows XP SP2. 

Both Firefox & IE supports decompression method 'gzip'
ie. an extended request header named
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING like 
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING=gzip,deflate 

By this way, the file can be kept around few kilobytes
in the server and delivered easily. I wonder, why
such... simple issue went un-noticed to everyone for
years... 


              
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Send holiday email and support a worthy cause. Do good. 
http://celebrity.mail.yahoo.com
_______________________________________________
Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html

_______________________________________________
Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html

Current thread:

Re: IE sp2 and Mozilla Firefox DoS. morning_wood (Jan 05)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: IE sp2 and Mozilla Firefox DoS. phased (Jan 06)
- Re: IE sp2 and Mozilla Firefox DoS. Sebastian Dietz (Jan 06)
- RE: IE sp2 and Mozilla Firefox DoS. bipin gautam (Jan 06)