full-disclosure - New (19.10.05) MS-IE Url Spoofing bug (byK-Gen)

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Date: Fri Oct 21 19:47:21 2005
From: nick at virus-l.demon.co.uk (Nick FitzGerald)
Subject: New (19.10.05) MS-IE Url Spoofing bug (byK-Gen)

Jake Cole to me:

> You've turned a technical discussion into a nitpick
> over poorly chosen words. I fail to see what that
> accomplishes.
> 
> The original author posted an example which was not
> cross-browser for reasons not related to the
> "exploit". IE uses document.write on the _current_
> document yet Mozilla uses it in its original called
> context. I simply added a SetTimeout to force Mozilla
> to delay the call by a few milliseconds (FYI, the
> "Firefox Version" works in IE also). But this little
> browser inconsistency is meaningless because there are
> dozens of other cross-browser methods to accomplish
> the redirection without using document.write or
> SetTimeout, as shown in the previous poster's example
> using 'self.location.href'.

...and probably even without using scripting at all.

> It is "expected" that when the user clicks on an
> anchor tag, any action specified in the onClick event
> will be executed. This is defined by the W3C spec and
> consistent across all browsers. If one of several
> scripting languages is enabled, the onClick event can
> perform any of an endless number of actions. It can
> create a mouseover, open a new window, call another
> script, load an external object, close the browser,
> and, yeah, it can even tell your browser to go to
> google.com. All of these actions are potentially
> malicious and may not be what the end-user expects.
> 
> Your argument that this is not sane behavior may be
> valid but this behavior is as old as the web as we
> know it. The time to speak up was almost a decade ago
> because, without massive ramifications to the
> functionality of millions of websites, not much is
> going to completely "fix" it now.

Some informed, security aware folk have been saying such (and many 
other) things are insane, and for that long.

Just because the lunatics running the asylum at the time ignored us 
does not mean we were wrong or that (some of us) will now simply accept 
that because it is that way it should stay thus.  For all its "good", 
the whole WWW thing is a classic example of why geeks should not be 
allowed to develop end-user facing technology without massive 
assistance from folk who have some idea of how the non-geek folk in the 
world actually work.

> This has gone way off track.

Only if you don't actually care about security, which has to make me 
wonder why you bother reading, and posting to, this list...


Regards,

Nick FitzGerald