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I was going through some website and stumbled upon following bug in it, while playing with different combinations for url parameters.

When I append ?&=& to any valid url on this website I get following error: /p is part of url (java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException).

Complete error

Chrome parses the string as below:

Parameter src Parsed

But this exception is not raised when I append ?&& instead of ?&=&. Chrome parses both string into same thing.

enter image description here enter image description here

  • How is "?&=&" actually parsed and how is it different from "?&&"? As chrome parses them into same thing why does it generate an exception only in former case?
  • What kind of bug does this website might have?
  • Can such bug be used to do some kind of attack on this website?

Note:

  • I do not own this website so I am just curious to know what might have caused this bug.
  • Issue is seen consistently on both chrome and firefox.
  • builtwith.com says this website uses ngix server.
  • Let me know if this is offtopic here. Didnt find any such info.

Edit:

I understand what this exception means. I just want to know if these 2 kind of parameter are parsed differently. What are the possible cause of such a bug.

Ravichandra Sutrave
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    It is impossible to answer your question without having the code that is responsible of parsing. It also has nothing to do with HTML, and nothing to do with your browser (neither Firefox nor Chrome). What happens is that the server has some internal problem with it. – Mark Segal May 24 '15 at 20:29
  • As others have said. Without the source code of the web site we can't give a definitive answer. But it looks like they rolled their own query string parser and are splitting the querystring on the & and = into an array and ending up with that error. – Dijkgraaf May 24 '15 at 20:52

1 Answers1

0

A java.lang.ArrayOutOfBoundsException caused by the Java backend of the page.

This exception occurs when a java application is trying to access an element in a Java Array that does not exist.

How and why exactly this occurs or how the url parameters are processed is impossible to say without having access to the source code of the backend.

It is not caused by the frontend code or by your browser.

TimoStaudinger
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