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Dictionary

Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.

billion laughs en · NOUN

Etymology

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

Meanings

  1. (plural, plural-only, qualifier:computer security) 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). 2016, Prakhar Prasad, Mastering Modern Web Penetration Testing, Packt Publishing Ltd, →ISBN, page 193:

Relateds

XML bomb