IE Shines On Broken Code

mschaef writes "While reading Larry Osterman'a blog (He's a long time Microsoftie, having worked on products dating back to DOS 4.0), I ran across this BugTraq entry on web browser security. Basically, the story is that Michael Zalewski started feeding randomly malformed HTML into Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, Lynx, and Links and watching what happened. Bottom line: 'All browsers but Microsoft Internet Explorer kept crashing on a regular basis due to NULL pointer references, memory corruption, buffer overflows, sometimes memory exhaustion; taking several minutes on average to encounter a tag they couldn't parse.' If you want to try this at home, he's also provided the tools he used in the BugTraq entry."

Comments

Because it's used to it?

[ideatrack]

There's a good phrase I can use to explain this one:

If you work in a monkey house, you expect to be pelted with shit.

hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to read the article, but the page seems to contain malformed HTML...

What they didn't say

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't say that IE also started randomly installing Bonzi Buddy et al during the test, the users' credit card numbers were automagically emailed to Romania, there was an sudden increase in outbound port 25 traffic from the system, and they ended the session with about 37 momre toolbars installed then they started with.

Re:So what is "random" here?

[Kick the Donkey]

Thats the thing about randomness. You can never be sure.

Re:An important security sidenote

[bunratty]

Yep, the first mozilla_die entry crashes Mozilla 1.8a4 for me, too. Sounds like the tests are repeatable enough. Now quick, everybody rush to file bug reports and the winners can collect their $500!

Re:An important security sidenote

[Old Wolf]

I have a worse CD.. if you put it in the drive then it starts to install Windows 98 :(