Brash Attack: Critical Chromium Flaw Allows DoS via Simple Code Injection

A newly disclosed flaw in Google’s ChromiumBlink rendering engine can enable a denial-of-service attack by forcing browsers to consume excessive memory. The PoC, named Brash, demonstrates that updates to document.title are not rate-limited, allowing millions of DOM modifications per second and causing the main thread to stall, which in tests can drive Chrome to allocate up to 18 GB of memory within thirty seconds and even crash Windows systems.

The vulnerability was first identified by Jose Pino, who, along with others, notified the Chromium security team on 28 August and received a follow-up on 30 August before the team ceased responding and no patch appeared. The flaw is described as potentially affecting every Chromium-based browser, including Chrome, Microsoft Edge, ChatGPT Atlas, and Brave, while Firefox and Safari are reportedly not affected due to their different engines.

Exploitation is straightforward: an attacker could embed malicious code on a web page and entice visitors to load it, after which memory would be drained and a denial-of-service could result. The researchers say the publication of the PoC is intended to spur action from Google given Chromium’s ubiquity.