in reply to hash collision DOS

Well maybe CGI.pm and/or CGI::Lite could let us restrict the CGI parameters that are accepted and stored and throw away all others. Why should the $CGI object remember the parameters we are not interested in anyway?

Jenda
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
   -- Rick Osborne

Edit by castaway: Closed small tag in signature

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Re^2: hash collision DOS (CGI.pm protection)
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Jun 02, 2003 at 21:19 UTC
    1. See the fine manual: you can already ->delete() parameters, so just grep unrequested parameters out of ->param() and dump them in the bit bucket.
    2. All webservers have a relatively tight maximum size for GET requests. (I think the default is something like 4kb for Apache.) You can set $CGI::POST_MAX for POST requests.
    Use those well and it shouldn't be possible to dump enough data on a script to slow it down significantly.

    Makeshifts last the longest.

[reply]
      Calling delete would happen after the problem has already occured. I concur, if $ENV{QUERY_STRING} length bothers you, simply cut it down (same goes for POST_MAX).

      I do feel a nice addition would be a something like 

      acceptOnly( thesekeys => qw[ these keys ] );
acceptOnly( thismanykeys => 44 );

      [download]
      This would be trivial to add ... just a thought

      MJD says you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!
      I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6x+5.8x. I take requests.
      ** The Third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

[reply]
[d/l]

      PodMaster is right. ->delete() comes too late. And even the $CGI::POST_MAX doesn't help much.

      Imagine you have a file upload script. There you need to keep the $CGI::POST_MAX rather high so they may be able to post quite a few CGI parameters. And then even the creation of the hash that CGI.pm uses to store data may take a lot of time. And the grep and delete would only make the issue worse.

      Jenda
      Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
         -- Rick Osborne

      Edit by castaway: Closed small tag in signature

[reply]
[d/l]

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