CVE-2009-5098

medium

Published 2011-09-13 · Modified 2026-04-29

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CVSS v3

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CVSS v4 NEW

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not yet in upstream

VIR risk

6.4

Description

The LunaSysMgr process in Palm Pre WebOS 1.1 and earlier, when not viewing web pages in landscape mode, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via a web page containing a long string following a refresh tag, which triggers a floating point exception.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

20%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

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Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Exploit-DB

EDB-9956 dos hardware verified text · 1 KB

Townsend Harris · 2009-10-14

Palm Pre WebOS 1.1 - Denial of Service

text exploit Source: Exploit-DB

I.  Description

The Palm Pre WebOS version <= 1.1 suffers from a floating point exception vulnerability when attempting to view a specially crafted web page. This vulnerability has been addressed in the latest patch from Palm and all users are recommended to update to WebOS version 1.2+.

II.  Impact

If a user views a malicious web page that contains specially crafted data, the "LunaSysMgr" process will crash, causing the device to simulate a reboot.  The bug itself is a floating point exception that crashes the "LunaSysMgr" process and forces the device to restart the process, simulating a reboot of the system.  At the time of the discovery, the greatest risk to the system was a denial of service condition. 

The crash does not occur when viewing the malicious web page while in landscape mode.

III. Proof of Concept

The Palm Pre WebOS version <= 1.1 will crash upon opening a web page that contains 50,280 bytes of data or greater and attempts to refresh the page.  Upon viewing the malicious web page the LunaSysMgr process will generate a floating point exception and simulate a system "reboot".

The following code will trigger the issue

"<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1">AAAAA..." using 50280 or more characters after the refresh.

IV. About

This vulnerability was discovered by Townsend Ladd Harris <PalmPreHacker [a t] gmail.com>

Vulnerability details will be posted at: http://tlhsecurity.blogspot.com/2009/10/palm-pre-webos-version-11-floating.html

References

CWEs

CWE-399

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.