[htdig] possible DoS attack?

[Daniel Naber]

Hi,

if you submit the attached form htdig will need several minutes to
perfom the search. The resulting page (second attached file) will
be incomplete. This happens only if you don't change my default
values for Match and Format. My default values have very long
strings that don't make sense.

This could be used to spawn many processes in a short amount
of time, which will use up the server's memory. These processes
do not use (much) cpu time. A fix in htsearch might be to check for
sensible values before doing anything. A workaround is probably to
configure your server so it will kill CGI scripts after some seconds
if they are not done. Another way is to use a wrapper around htsearch
which will kill itself (e.g. by sending itself a signal) after a
certain time.

This has been tested with htdig 3.1.2 and 3.1.3 on a local machine
with a very small index (less than 10 documents). BTW, I know that you
can DoS attack anything by just sending enough queries but I think
this is more serious.

Regards
 Daniel Naber

-- 
PGP Key fingerprint = 3D 98 9E D2 00 B6 E0 9D  7E B9 77 23 17 E2 11 6A
http://cgi4all.alabanza.com/glasatelier/

Title: ht://Dig WWW Search

- WWW Site Search on DocHost - This search will allow you to search the contents of all the publicly available WWW documents at this site and SuSE Linux Help Documents include all man pages. Match: All Any Boolean Format: Long Short Sort by: Score Time Title Reverse Score Reverse Time Reverse Title Match:

Title: No match for ''

Search results No matches were found for '' Check the spelling of the search word(s) you used. If the spelling is correct and you only used one word, try using one or more similar search words with "Any." If the spelling is correct and you used more than one word with "Any," try using one or more similar search words with "Any." If the spelling is correct and you used more than one word with "All," try using one or more of the same words with "Any." Match: All Any Boolean Format: Long Short Sort by: Score Time Title Reverse Score Reverse Time Reverse Title Refine search: