Critical Brash Vulnerability: Blink Engine Flaw Breaks Chromium Browsers
Overview : Brash Vulnerability works on Google Chrome and all web browsers that run on Chromium.
A newly disclosed vulnerability, Brash, exposed a critical architectural flaw in Chromium’s Blink rendering engine. Blink is Chromium’s open-source rendering engine responsible for parsing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, building the DOM and render trees, and executing script-driven updates to the browser interface.
It underpins the user experience of all Chromium-based browsers and is a core component of their performance and stability.
The issue allows a malicious web page to crash Chromium-based browsers within seconds, including Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera etc. The attack works by overloading Blink’s main UI thread using a flood of unthrottled DOM operations. A public proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit is available and can be tested on machines, that escalating the urgency for patching across all Chromium-based platforms.
Technical Details
Blink lacks any rate limiting or coalescing on rapid document. title updates, allowing an attacker to flood the browser with millions of DOM mutations per second.
This saturates the browser’s main UI thread, causing extreme CPU usage and blocking event processing, which leads to the browser tab freezing or crashing within 15 to 60 seconds. The exploit can also be use to trigger after a delay or at a precise scheduled time, turning it into a highly controllable logic bomb.
The exploit requires no special permissions beyond navigating to a malicious page, presenting a severe and immediate operational risk until patches are deployed.
Attack Flow


Recommendations
You can follow the recommendations below
- Avoid clicking on suspicious or untrusted links, especially those prompting unexpected redirects or downloads.
- Keep all Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave etc.) updated with the latest security patches as vendors release fixes.
- Enforce automatic browser updates within organizations to ensure all users receive critical patches promptly.
- Monitor computer endpoints for unusual CPU spikes related to browser processes, which can indicate ongoing exploitation attempts.
- Educate users and employees about the risk of drive-by attacks through malicious websites and the importance of security awareness.
Conclusion:
The Brash vulnerability reveals how a simple architectural oversight. It lets attackers crash browsers by flooding them with too many title updates too fast, causing the browser to freeze or crash. This attack can be scheduled to happen later, making it harder to detect.
Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari are immune to the attack, as are all third-party browsers on iOS, given that they are all based on WebKit.
The best defense is to keep browsers updated, avoid suspicious links and stay alert for unusual computer slowdowns.
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