full-disclosure - 4 Questions: Latest IE vulnerability, Firefox vs IE security, User vs Admin risk profile, and browsers coded in 100% Managed Verifiable code

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Date: Wed Mar 29 16:15:10 2006
From: eaton.lists at gmail.com (Brian Eaton)
Subject: 4 Questions: Latest IE vulnerability,
	Firefox vs IE security, User vs Admin risk profile,
	and browsers coded in 100% Managed Verifiable code

On 3/28/06, michaelslists@...il.com <michaelslists@...il.com> wrote:
> no, a browser written in java would not have buffer overflow/stack
> issues. the jvm is specifically designed to prevent it ...
>
> -- Michael
>
> On 3/29/06, Pavel Kankovsky <peak@...o.troja.mff.cuni.cz> wrote:
> > On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, Brian Eaton wrote:
> >
> > > If I run a pure-java browser, for example, no web site's HTML code is
> > > going to cause a buffer overflow in the parser.
> >
> > Even a "pure-java browser" would rest on the top of a huge pile of native
> > code (OS, JRE, native libraries). A seemingly innocent piece of data
> > passed to that native code might trigger a bug (perhaps even a buffer
> > overflow) in it...
> >
> > Unlikely (read: less likely than a direct attack vector) but still
> > possible.

Pavel is talking about native code, which the JVM needs to interface
to the rest of the OS.  Native code can have buffer overflows, and
those bugs can be exploitable.

For example: http://www.appsecinc.com/resources/alerts/general/WEBSPHERE-001.html

The risk is several orders of magnitude less, but it is there.

Regards,
Brian