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Safari Security Hole Allows Cookie Theft
An anonymous reader writes "MacSlash posted a story about a vulnerability in Safari. The exploit allows someone to steal any of your domain-based cookies (passwords, private info, etc.) from any website. Mozilla and Internet Explorer had the same bug in the past."
Potentially, but I doubt it. The two browsers share a rendering engine, not much else. Cookies are purely a protocol issue, they add extra data when doing a GET/POST request on a web page. Nothing whatsoever to do with HTML rendering.
Potentially a bug could exist in the Javascript engine, and since Javascript can access cookies, and they could be stolen this way. However this particular bug doesn't appear to be JS-related, rather it's something more fundamental (but easily fixed by Apple, hopefully).
Since Konqueror uses KDE/QT's socket classes, whilst Safari uses the Carbon/Darwin sockets interface, it's unlikely the bug would rear it's head in Konqueror IMHO.
I find them rather useful when you just have to get that first post on a Slashdot article but can't remember your password. See, if you'd had cookies enabled, you might well have made it in time!
But seriously, I think cookies are a safe and generally useful concept. I have third-party cookies blocked since these can be downloaded with adverts and track you using the http-referer field. However, first party cookies are almost always safe.
Not having to log in again at every single site just makes it easier, IMHO. I back up my cookie data more often than my bookmarks.
I am trying the "test" and all I get is:
:)
Please wait while loading the script
You are stuck on this page ?
It means that your browser is not vulnerable, sorry, or maybe, not so
sorry, it's how the things should be !!!.
You can press the back button now
I am running Safari 1.1.1 (v100.1). Could it be because
of This Hint?
If the web app allows you to edit your information once you've aquired an authorized session, then stealing that authorized session could allow someone to hijack your information and/or your identity with that web app/company.
This isn't a Safari bug, this is how your OS deals with virtual memory.
/var/vm
Look in
And you will see... swapfile1, swapfile2... etc. The OS creates these as needed.
Now for the OS to recover swap space, there has no be no pages addressed to a swap file. When you run Safari what gets paged out to disk? Not safari, but all the other applications you are running. Therefore, quitting Safari does nothing. The OS won't page in the swap unless you need access to that page of memory.
First of all note that OmniWeb is not affected by this bug. Outside of a lack of tabs, it's a very good Web Browser that should satisfy you until Apple patches this bug. Of course, I'm sure the Slashdot readership is aware of other options as well.
.amazon.com for the purpose of cookie security. This seems to be a bug in the code around KHTML, not KHTML itself, since vulnerable OmniWeb uses the same WebCore framework that is used by Safari without being vulnerable.
As for the discussion as to whether this is a bug in KHTML in general, it is not. The bug is in the way browsers parse the hostname out of a URL differently for cookies and the connection itself. So in Safari the url:
http://www.EvilSite.com%00.amazon.com/
will connect to www.EvilSite.com, but be considered in the domain of
http://hetima.com/soft/cookiemonsterfix.html Scroll down for the english explanations. But you also can proceed to download the DMG file itself, as substancial english documentation is included there. G