Chrome Memory Exhaustion DoS Vulnerability

AdityaK Sood, from the EvilFingers community who disclosed the first Chrome DoS vulnerability at the beginning of the month, has released a proof of concept demonstrating a memory exhaustion DoS vulnerability affecting Google Chrome versions 0.2.149.30 and 0.2.149.29. He went on to state:

“The Google chrome browser is vulnerable to memory exhaustion based denial of service which can be triggered remotely.The vulnerability triggers when Carriage Return(\r\n\r\n) is passed as an argument to window.open() function. It makes the Google Chrome to generate number of windows at the same time thereby leading to memory exhaustion. The behavior can be easily checked by looking at the task manager as with no time the memory usage rises high. The problem lies in the handling of object and its value returned by the javascript function. Once it is triggered the pop ups are started generating. The Google Chrome browser generate object windows continuously there by affecting memory of the resultant system. Probably it can be crashed within no time. User interaction is required in this.”

Visiting a Vulnerable web page can result in 100% resource usage on PC’s, resulting in the crashing of open applications and the loss of unsaved work.

Note:

Before visiting the proof of concept page, ensure you do not have any unsaved work. The concept page is not malicious, but it will elevate your PC’s resource usage. It’s designed to “not” be too aggressive or to crash your running application but will highlight the issue.

Visit: Proof of Concept

Credit to: Aditya K Sood of SecNiche Security for the discovery.