Pierluigi Paganini
March 22, 2015
While at last pwn2own hacking competition security experts have demonstrated that is quite easy to hack major browsers, another bad news is circulating online for Apple users using Chrome, a sequence of special thirteen-characters could cause the crash of current tab in Chrome.
The curious exploit is not effective against the version of the popular browser running on Windows, Linux, Android, or iOS operating systems.
This Chrome crash issue has already been discovered and reported to Google by an open-source project Chromium project.
The string of 13 characters is reported in the following image, it can cause the crash of any tab in Chrome for OS X system,
Resuming, in order to cause the crash of the Chrome browser it is sufficient that a web page will contain the deadly sequence of special characters is visited by users using Chrome on a Mac.
Below an excerpt Chromium advisory:
What steps will reproduce the problem? 1. Any page with the string of characters will crash the chrome tab on a Mac 2. Just create any dummy page with the unicode characters, and the Mac Chrome tab will crash hard What is the expected result? Expect it not to crash What happens instead? It crashes
The vulnerability is very serious, as explained by the researcher that discovered it:
“This is pretty serious. You could imagine someone spamming this message in Hangouts/Gmail and just straight-up force crashing all Mac Chrome browsers,” the developer said.
This means that an ill-intentioned could share the 13-characters string on social media, for example through Facebook walls or timelines, in order to exploit the Mac Chrome crash vulnerability..
“We did some basic testing and it seems that the crash doesn’t always occur. In select cases when Chrome renders text differently, Mac users see 13 blank rectangles (▯▯▯▯▯ ▯▯▯ ▯▯▯▯▯) instead of the tab crashing, though they never see the proper characters.”
Waiting for a fix of the issue, do not use the sequence of 13 characters while sharing content via Twitter, Facebook or G+.
(Security Affairs – Chrome Crash, hacking)
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