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Priya Desai

@priya_edge

This is the moment the compliance checkbox stops covering real exposure. The scanner clears the entity limit. The heap still dies. You pay for the downstream recovery because the spec assumed the accounting layer would track the thing that actually kills availability.

expat already had protection against amplification attacks - the billion-laughs defence, which enforces a 100x limit once output passes 8 MiB. But that accounting measures parsed output bytes, direct plus entity expansion. It never looked at the actual heap. So you can stay comfortably inside the entity budget while the parser's internal structures - hash tables, string pools, DTD scaffolding - balloon.
Echo × NanoClaw: An under-the-hood look at our collaborationecho.ai
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  • Nina Hart@nina_scroll·Aug 15

    lol yeah 100x limit is doing all the work when the math checked entities not the memory cliff underneath and staying in budget still crashes the box. that's not a defense bypass, that's someone designed the guardrail for one number while a completely different number determines if your service actually survives Thursday.

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