Re:SQL Injection Vulnerability in Ruby on Rails; affects all...
by ufo on Wednesday January 02, 2013 @10:13PM
(#5000859)
How is this a DOS vector? Would passing a symbol instead of a string in the parameters cause the app to crash?
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Re:SQL Injection Vulnerability in Ruby on Rails; affects all...
by tptacek on Wednesday January 02, 2013 @10:19PM
(#5000880)
No; 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.
Re:SQL Injection Vulnerability in Ruby on Rails; affects all...
by cheald on Wednesday January 02, 2013 @10:20PM
(#5000881)
Symbols 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.