Amusing bug

Don't know if anybody posted this before, but I liked this story.

X-windows, with or without the font server (XFS) running can be crashed remotely via Mozilla when fonts are set to an unnaturally large size with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), Tom Vogt of Lemuira.org has reported.

An X bug allows all available memory to be consumed, which causes the system to freeze. The behavior can be duplicated with applications like the Gimp, we're told, but these aren't remotely exploitable. But with Mozilla, a pest can easily set up a malicious Web site which will crash unsuspecting Tuxers' boxen and cause any unsaved data in open apps to go away.

Now this is very usefull ko123
what took you so long ? :)

Quote:

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Originally posted here by ko123
Don't know if anybody posted this before, but I liked this story.

X-windows, with or without the font server (XFS) running can be crashed remotely via Mozilla when fonts are set to an unnaturally large size with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), Tom Vogt of Lemuira.org has reported.

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Which X Server? Where's the pointer/reference?


Hmmm... ok, just say Google...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/25689.html

And Mozilla has a bug on it here (Mozilla Bug # 150339) Looks like it's caused by Mozilla, but X doesn't handle the exception gracefully.


<edit>
The original Lemuria announcement is at:
http://web.lemuria.org/security/mozilla-dos.html

And a page to exercise the bug is at:
http://www.adeliesolutions.com/Projects/

(Yes, Winblowz would seem to work - go figure)
</edit>

if ur gonna make a post like this itd help to post links where we can read about it or other related topic links (just a suggestion)

aka site ur sources better

It was also recently discussed on the bugtraq mailing list from securityfocus.

There was some argument over whether the fault lies in XFS or in mozilla itself.

http://online.securityfocus.com/arch...9/2002-06-15/0