This Flaw Can Crash Your Chrome Browser in Seconds

The 'Brash' flaw not only affects all Chromium-based browsers and works by bombarding a little-known function.

A newly discovered flaw can crash a browser session in seconds.

The vulnerability affects browsers that use the open-source Chromium platform, including Google's Chrome and Microsoft's Edge, according to security researcher Jose Pino, who disclosed the threat this week. “It allows any Chromium browser to collapse in 15-60 seconds by exploiting an architectural flaw,” he says. 

The so-called “Brash” attack targets Blink, the rendering engine in Chromium that displays web pages. Pino discovered you can essentially flood requests to Blink through an application programming interface (API) involving the “document.title" property. 

 Pino created a site to demonstrate the attack. (Credit: Jose Pino)

“Blink processes each document.title change synchronously on the main thread without rate limiting. This creates a bottleneck,” he wrote on a GitHub page that covers the attack. As a result, a hacker can exploit the technical oversight to create a malicious web page that can overwhelm the engine. “The impact is significant; it consumes high CPU resources, degrades overall system performance, and can halt or slow down other processes running simultaneously,” he warned.

To demonstrate the threat, Pino created a site that can trigger the attack, which successfully crashed our Chrome browser session on the desktop and Android. His research found that the flaw can also take down ChatGPT Atlas, Brave, and Opera, which use Chromium. However, non-Chromium browsers such as Firefox and Apple’s Safari are immune. 

Pino’s GitHub page describes his technique to flood Blink’s API, which involves injecting  “approximately 24 million updates per second,” triggering any Chromium browser to collapse. Although the attack won’t loot your password or expose your privacy, it can still be a nuisance by abruptly shutting down all your browser tabs. 

On why the flaw has no patch, Pino told The Register he decided to disclose the flaw to “draw attention to a severe issue affecting broad internet users after my initial report two months ago went unanswered.” Google is reportedly looking into the issue, which can likely be fixed by adding a rate-limit restriction.

Source