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HTML5 Storage Bug Can Fill Your Hard Drive

Posted by Soulskill on from the disk-write-error dept.

Dystopian Rebel writes "A Stanford comp-sci student has found a serious bug in Chromium, Safari, Opera, and MSIE. Feross Aboukhadijeh has demonstrated that these browsers allow unbounded local storage. 'The HTML5 Web Storage standard was developed to allow sites to store larger amounts of data (like 5-10 MB) than was previously allowed by cookies (like 4KB). ... The current limits are: 2.5 MB per origin in Google Chrome, 5 MB per origin in Mozilla Firefox and Opera, 10 MB per origin in Internet Explorer. However, what if we get clever and make lots of subdomains like 1.filldisk.com, 2.filldisk.com, 3.filldisk.com, and so on? Should each subdomain get 5MB of space? The standard says no. ... However, Chrome, Safari, and IE currently do not implement any such "affiliated site" storage limit.' Aboukhadijeh has logged the bug with Chromium and Apple, but couldn't do so for MSIE because 'the page is broken" (see http://connect.microsoft.com/IE). Oops. Firefox's implementation of HTML5 local storage is not vulnerable to this exploit."

5 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So What's The Point by MicrosoftRepresentit · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Using javorscript to generate the data quicker than most hard disks could write it, with no bandwidth usage other than fetching the script itself, so thats not a problem. But yeah, just a single gigabyte would require 200 subdomains so I'm not really seeing the danger here.

  2. It's a feature! by sootman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    1.porn.com, 2.porn.com, 3.porn.com...

    Actually, that could be handy -- you could store lots of music from song.album.artist.someMP3site.com.

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    1. Re:It's a feature! by sootman · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Come to think of it, it could lead to problems. What if you read a lot of blogs hosted on wordpress.com? Or use many apps on *.google.com?

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  3. Re:So What's The Point by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you have a popular blog, there's no need to pay for network backup anymore - just drop enough 5MB blocks encrypted and with decent FEC to each of your readers. If you ever have a failure, just throw up a basic page with a funny cat picture and start restoring from your distributed backup.

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  4. Re:So What's The Point by thetoadwarrior · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's a web app, let the client generate it. You generate the free sub domains with a script or something a bit more intelligent but either way the cost should be minimal. I assume as well you wouldn't necessarily need to fill it completely. A gig or two might ruin the browser's performance.