From: full-disclosure at royds.net (Bill Royds)
Subject: Interesting side effect of the new IE patch

NTSC has been the North American television standard since 1945 (it stands
for National Television Standards Committee). Where are you saying it is
non-standard. It is just that there are more than one group setting
standards as in computers. The IETF sets standards for the Internet. ISO
sets standards for X.25 packet switching. If you don't like IETF standards,
disconnect now and use X.25 (if you can find it).
   By your logic, one should never use anything other than Windows since it
is the "de facto" standard and never connect to any other network than AOL,
since it has a large share of the market.
  Standards are agreed to by a standards body, not a single manufacturer nor
just common use. Often standards bodies will try to codify common use into a
standard. But if the standards body is doing its job, it will find unsafe
usage (such as the userinfo@ convention) and delete it from the published
standard. Standards often reach an end of lifetime because they are
inadequate for later technology. Are you still using leaded gasoline in your
car because it was once the standard? Microsoft saw the error of their
deviation from the standard and has fixed it. The world changes. Get over
it.

  Oh yes, in a number of jurisdictions, it is now illegal to have a cell
phone connected while driving. People own up to mistakes and fix them. Will
you?


Headers allow the transmittal of authentication information at initial call,
allowing pre-programmed information rather than the returned error code and
then authentication of BasicAuth. It covers the only possible legitimate use
of the userinfo@...t syntax.

-----Original Message-----
From: full-disclosure-admin@...ts.netsys.com
[mailto:full-disclosure-admin@...ts.netsys.com] On Behalf Of Stefan Esser
Sent: February 6, 2004 1:49 PM
To: Bill Royds
Cc: full-disclosure@...ts.netsys.com
Subject: Re: [Full-Disclosure] Interesting side effect of the new IE patch

> Amy browser that allows an HTTP URL with an @ sign in it is buggy and
should
> be fixed.

Blablabla. Anyone who bought a NTSC tv should give it back, cause it was not
the standard at the time it was introduced.

> HTTP URLs are not RFC compliant if the have the user:password@...t syntax.

Yes and? Any car vendor who builds a phone into the car is also adding a
feature which could compromise the security. Because it the statistic says
that when you phone while driving you more often produce crashs.
And correct me if I am wrong, but I do not see "phone" in the official
definition of a car. So whoever added a phone to his cars first is
obviously a very very bad guy. 

How is the car example different from HTTP URLs. Microsoft added a
feature to the HTTP URLs. This is the way they work. They change standards
into what they like. You may like that or not, but you absolutely CANNOT
say that a browser that implements this feature is buggy. Because it isnt
It just has a feature that is not covered by the standard. 

If humans would only be allowed to perform actions which are
written down in some standard and not "improve" or change the way they act
we would not have any inventions anymore.

You may like it or not. It was maybe braindead or not to add this feature.
BUT you simply cannot call it a bug, because it was implemented into the
browsers on purpose and not by accident (Well maybe with IE as exception)

> Microsoft fixed their bug and you are complaining about a bug and
> vulnerability fix because it removes some exploits.

Where am I complaining about Microsoft fixing the 0x01 vulnerability?

> Microsoft finally did the right thing and fixed their browsers. How long
do
> you think it will take for Mozilla and Opera and Safari to change as well?

Yeah, we will see if the world is full of RFC compliant geeks.

> The only thing that should be done for legitimate programmed uses of an
> account and password is to add HTTP headers to the RFC (RFC 2616) to allow
> Username, authentication type and password.
> 
> USERNAME:DumbLuser
> Authentication-type:plainText
> Password:foolish

How would that be different from BasicAuth? And I hope your argument is
not that the password is not transfered in plain text with BasicAuth...

Stefan

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