Don't visit the FillDisk.com site, which I ran across a link to from an Arts Technica article that talks about a flaw in web browsers. It's possible a security flaw, possibly an availability flaw as well. Apparently the new HTML specification allows for sites to use the Web Storage Standard to keep data on your hard disk. There is a limit in most browsers for how much data you can store per domain, but the FillDisk site uses sub domains to put random junk on your drive. The author of the site built this as a proof of concept and was able to add 1GB of data to an SSD on a laptop every 16 seconds.
That's a denial of service type attack that I hadn't expected, but it is an interesting attack vector. I wouldn't expect this to impact servers, but if servers are consuming web services, and using controls based on browsers, there is the possibility this type of attack might affect them. I'd hope this were limited to web servers and not impact database servers, but it's certainly a concern if you have processes running on your database server that might retrieve data from a remote source.
This makes me want to re-architect the way we build data driven application in the future, to prevent this type of vandalism. Maybe building an application level firewall that proxies all access to a database server. The idea of application servers was very popular a decade ago, but it seems few systems actually implemented this type of architecture. Perhaps this is because the web server/database server pairing is such an easy paradigm to build for most developers.
Frameworks that allowed separation of the application through a middle layer could allow for caching of data in addition to more security. That could increase performance and scalability as the database wouldn't be the single bottleneck for all requests.
Steve Jones
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