Redazione RHC : 30 October 2025 12:17
Researcher José Pino has presented a proof-of-concept vulnerability in the Blink rendering engine used in Chromium -based browsers, demonstrating how a single web page can crash many popular browsers and render a device unusable in seconds.
Pino published code for Brash , which demonstrated massive UI degradation and complete tab freezing on most tested Chromium builds.
The vulnerability is related to an architectural feature of document.title processing: Blink has no rate limit for document title updates, allowing the script to make millions of changes to the DOM and overload the main thread in a matter of milliseconds.
Pino’s method involves loading a set of hundreds of unique 512-character hexadecimal strings into memory, followed by short bursts of title updates in high-frequency mode (example configuration: “burst: 8000, interval: 1 ms”), resulting in approximately tens of millions of edit attempts per second.
As a result, tabs become unresponsive after 5-10 seconds, and the browser freezes or requires a force-quit within 15-60 seconds. In some Windows tests, a single tab consumed up to 18 GB of RAM and caused the system to freeze.
Pino tested the proof-of-concept on 11 browsers on Android, macOS, Windows, and Linux. Nine were found to be vulnerable, including Chrome, Edge, Vivaldi, Arc, Dia, Opera, Perplexity Comet, ChatGPT Atlas, and Brave .
Two browsers with other engines, Firefox (Gecko) and Safari (WebKit), demonstrated no reproducibility, as did all iOS builds, which require WebKit. The researcher notified the Chromium team on August 28th and repeated the message on August 30th, but received no immediate response. He then published the proof-of-concept to draw attention to the issue, despite public silence.
As of publication, the vulnerability does not have a public identifier; the report and proof-of-concept are posted by the author on GitHub, and representatives from several vendors have not yet provided detailed comments.
While exploitation does not reveal the contents of the tabs or lead to arbitrary code execution, it can cause loss of unsaved data and widespread crashes, potentially making any website visited a source of error.
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