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Seconding icambron - how? Because I've been up and down that code and can't see any way to do it. Frankly, I don't think it's possible, because otherwise you wo
by cheald 14y ago
Seconding icambron - how? Because I've been up and down that code and can't see any way to do it. Frankly, I don't think it's possible, because otherwise you would have a trivial DOS vector into any Rails application.
- ufo 14y agoHow is this a DOS vector? Would passing a symbol instead of a string in the parameters cause the app to crash?
- tptacek 14y agoNo; the theory behind that attack is, Rails doesn't GC symbols, so you could just repeatedly stuff requests that created new symbols until memory was exhausted. I don't care about that attack (there are others like it), but it's viable.
- cheald 14y agoSymbols are interned and never garbage collected, so if you can cause an app to create arbitrary symbols, you can cause it to use up all the RAM on the machine and throw it into swap, effectively killing its ability to respond to requests in any kind of timely fashion.
- tptacek 14y agoIt is possible, but not straightforwardly. There isn't a code path I know of that converts param keys to symbols. (I wouldn't have said it was possible unless I had a curl line that did it, for what it's worth.)
- cheald 14y agoYou're the expert here, but that's really disturbing. Is it fixable?