Other nomination

Redirector's hell

Looped DoS built from two URL shorteners aimed at each other: a TinyURL custom alias resolves to an ElfURL link that resolves back, so any client following either address redirects forever. Demonstrated with live tinyurl.com and elfurl.com pairs. Firefox halts with a Redirect Loop Error, IE does not, and crawlers keep both services loaded. Classed as abuse of TinyURL's custom-alias feature.

In the archive

• Nominated for the 2008 Top 10 Web Hacking Techniques

Tags

• dos
• open-redirect
• abuse-of-functionality
• case-study
• url-parsing
• owasp-a04-2021

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