Re: Microsoft IE cookies readable via about: URLS

From: Clover Andrew (acloverat_private)
Date: Mon Nov 12 2001 - 07:14:43 PST

  • Next message: Izik: "the joke continue"

    Nick FitzGerald <nick@virus-l.demon.co.uk> wrote:
    
    > This was hinted at in Andrew Clover's message of 19 October
    
    Yes. I noted that "IE incorrectly applies HTTP-style URL parsing to
    'about:' URLs", from which I really should have investigated further to
    find that in fact it doesn't recognise the difference between http: and
    about: at all in the case of cookie access security. My bad - having
    found what I considered enough of a hole to require patching, I didn't
    go further and find its full potential.
    
    > That's interesting, given they seemed to think there was no
    > problem (despite the flaw being obvious to the rest of the
    > world) back when Andrew mentioned it...
    
    Well, my exploit was less serious than this, but it was indicative of
    brokenness, and I would have expected the IE team to at least
    investigate. Instead, Microsoft seemed more interested in arguing
    Mitigating Factors. It would be easiest to simply remove the
    about-unknown-page-echoing-"feature", since it is of no legitimate use
    whatsoever (or at least enforce HTML-escaping on it). I do not expect
    the patch for Jouko's more serious exploit to do so, when it's released,
    but there's always hope.
    
    > HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet 
    > Settings\ZoneMap\ProtocolDefaults\about = 4
    
    Indeed, I've been using this a while with no problems, recommend it.
    
    -- 
    Andrew Clover
    Technical Consultant
    1VALUE.com AG
    



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