Security hole slams Chromium browsers - no fix yet

Exclusive A critical, currently unpatched bug in Chromium's Blink rendering engine can be abused to crash many Chromium-based browsers within seconds, causing a denial-of-service condition – and, in some tests, freezing the host system. Security researcher Jose Pino found the flaw, and created a proof-of-concept exploit, Brash, to demonstrate the vulnerability affecting billions of people worldwide. Chrome is the most popular browser in the world with over 70% market share, according to StatCounter, and that's not counting all the people who use any of the open source Chromium-based browsers, including Microsoft Edge, OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas, Brave, and Vivaldi. Given the ITU counts 5.5 billion internet users, that suggests Chrome alone is used by more than 3 billion people. Brash exploits an architectural flaw in Blink, the rendering engine used by Chromium-based browsers. After testing the PoC on 11 major browsers on Android, macOS, Windows, and Linux, Pino found it works on nine of them, causing those browsers to collapse in 15 to 60 seconds. It affects Chromium versions 143.0.7483.0 and later. "The attack vector originates from the complete absence of rate limiting on document.title API updates," Pino said in research published on GitHub. "This allows injecting millions of DOM mutations per second, and during this injection attempt, it saturates the main thread, disrupting the event loop and causing the interface to collapse." The Register tested the code on Edge, and not ...