billion laughs

English

Etymology

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

Noun

billion laughs pl (plural only)

1. (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.
   • 2016, Prakhar Prasad, Mastering Modern Web Penetration Testing, Packt Publishing Ltd, →ISBN, page 193:

     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).

See also

• XML bomb