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How is this a DOS vector? Would passing a symbol instead of a string in the parameters cause the app to crash?
by ufo 14y ago
How 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.