New Delhi: A recent bug in Google Chrome has been discovered that seems to be crashing the browser on entering a 16-character link in the address bar. You can try it yourself. Fire up your Chrome browser, copy the text within quotes "http://a/%%30%30" and hit enter. It is also claimed that a mere hovering over the 16-character string could also lead Chrome to crash.
This bug was originally reported by Andris Atteka, who in his blog post explains that the Google Chrome browser can be crashed just by adding a null character in the URL string. The link reported by him has 26 characters, but VentureBeat says to have shaved off 10 more characters to come up with an even shorter link that is also capable of tripping up Chrome.
The report from VentureBeat explains it technically, "It seems to be crashing in some very old code. In the Debug build, it’s hitting a DCHECK on an invalid URL in GURL, deep in some History code. Given that it’s hitting a CHECK in the Release build, I don’t think this is actually a security bug, but I’m going to leave it as such."
While this bug is not believed to be a security threat, per se, it could be used to adversely impact Chrome users.
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