Google Chrome Crashes Instantly With Simple URL String

If you use Google Chrome, you’ll want to watch out for this bug: According to VentureBeat, a specific character string of text could bring your browser crashing to the ground.

While this bug is not believed to be a security threat, per se, it could be used to adversely impact Chrome users. The hack was discovered by a Redditor, j3rry, can crash the latest build of Chrome even if someone hovers with mouse over the link.

This isn’t the first time a link has been discovered that could instantly crash Chrome. His example was 26 characters long, but we have managed to shave off 10 characters to produce an even simpler string that will crash Chrome. All you have to do is copy the following 16 characters http://a/%%30%30, paste it in the Google Chrome search bar and press search or enter.

A new bug now affects Google’s Chrome browser in a like manner, as Andris Atteka points out in a new blog post. No matter where I inserted the null character, the browser refused to crash on my phone. While Atteka’s 26-character URL string crashed just the tab, the 16-character string crashes Chrome altogether – all windows and all tabs. Old code seems to be part of the issue, according to a Chromium team member.

Although Google runs a bug bounty program, the company is not paying out in this instance because it is not seen as a security problem – although it is certainly an issue that is slightly irritating and open to exploitation. “In the Debug build, it’s hitting a DCHECK on an invalid URL in GURL, deep in some History code”, explained developer jww@chromium.org in response to Atteka’s finding.

Lastly, it’s worth pointing out that this crash bug affects Google Chrome 45, which is the last stable version of the browser.