Lua authors think the problem is overstated, but are fixing it anyway for "propaganda purposes": http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/87667

I find their attitude worrying - how can something be overstated if it's essentially possible for anyone to take down servers as easy as that? It's possible, so it must be fixed, that's what basically any text book on security tries to convey: there's no such thing as "mostly secure" - either it's done right or there's no need to do anything at all. Ignorance won't help in making the web a safer (more secure) place.

It should be fixed in the web frameworks people are using. Some rolled out fixes after the bug disclosure (which came surprisingly late considering it was well known in theory and perl fixed it years ago (in 2003)). The fix is simple -- don't allow users to pass thousands of arguments/options or basically any user input which is later put into dictionary.

Yes, that's exactly his point. There are many other issues as well that can DoS the average system.

And they are fixing it, so why say "it must be fixed"?

That guy is smart

Perl has not been vulnerable to this kind of attack for 9 years (Perl 5.8.1)

[1] http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsec.html#Algorithmic-Complexity-...

I believe perl fixed this issue years ago (and this recent wave of discovery was based on a paper which was sent to perl maintainers long ago). Ruby fixed this issue in 1.9 before it was a big deal. I am not aware if Ruby 1.8 has backported a fix yet.

1: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~scrosby/hash/CrosbyWallach_UsenixSec...

Ruby seems to have fixed it in December, PHP in January and Node was trying to get a fix in for v8 but it's been rejected AFAIR and then they patched their version. Perl hasn't actually been vulnerable for a couple of years.

I thought Perl was not? At least 5.14 isn't.