Simon Willison’s Weblog

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2 items tagged “billionlaughs”

2008

Tip: Configure SAX parsers for secure processing. Explains the billion laughs attack, among others. # 23rd August 2008, 11:12 am

DoS vulnerability in REXML. Ruby’s REXML library is susceptible to the “billion laughs” denial of service attack where recursively nested entities expand a single entitity reference to a billion characters (kind of like the exploding zip file attack). Rails applications that process user-supplied XML should apply the monkey-patch ASAP; a proper gem update is forthcoming. # 23rd August 2008, 11:11 am