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billion laughs

noun

Etymology

In the most frequently cited example of such an attack, the first entity is the string lol (“laugh out loud”).

Definitions

  1. A type of denial-of-service attack which is aimed at parsers of XML documents, based on…

    A type of denial-of-service attack which is aimed at parsers of XML documents, based on defining entities that expand to large numbers of copies of other entities.

    • The XML billion laughs DoS attack simply starts by declaring an XML document with an entity named lol (hence the name laugh gets associated with it, but in a general case it can be any valid name).

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for billion laughs. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA