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Re: Firefox 0.92 DoS via TinyBMP


From: Ali Campbell <fdisclosure () alicampbell org uk>
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 22:12:40 +0100

This is precisely the point that almost everyone is missing
completely (but still clamoring "it works on X, it doesn't work on
Y"), and that Sapheriel pinpointed: the core problem lies in the Windows .bmp implementation.

So, I wonder aloud, what is the purpose of publishing 'advisories' that misattribute this flaw to IE [1] or Firefox or any of the other
hundreds or thousands of programs that use it and can be DoSed as a
result?

st3ng4h

I agree when you say that it's probably a flaw in the BMP lib implementation. But as I've pointed out once already, Windows isn't the only afflicted platform:

Ali-Campbells-Computer:~ alicampbell$ uname -a

Darwin Ali-Campbells-Computer.local 7.4.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.4.0: Wed May 12 16:58:24 PDT 2004; root:xnu/xnu-517.7.7.obj~7/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc

Ali-Campbells-Computer:~ alicampbell$ top

<!-- snip -->
  PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE VSIZE
<!-- snip -->
1449 firefox-bi 0.5% 0:11.84 10 191 293 18.4M 37.2M 46.9M 3.32G
<!-- snip -->

That's VSIZE=3.32 gigabytes.

As others have also observed, there isn't any machine slowdown when I try this either on Windows or OS X, despite the large amount of virtual memory sucked up. I'm postulating that this is because memory is being malloc()ed but not actually written to, so physical page frames for it never get allocated. I could be wrong though, as my current knowledge of kernels falls squarely in the "tourist" category.

Ali

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