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Google Fixes IE Bug
aussie_a writes "Without accepting blame Google has quickly patched the vulnerability, without requiring users to download a patch. Previously covered by Slashdot, the flaw allowed people to access files and passwords on a computer via any website when viewed with IE while running Google Desktop." From the article: "'Google was able to address the problem quickly because it didn't require changing any code at the user's desktop,' MacDonald said. 'Google applied more stringent security controls on its main site, which shut down the exploit.' The incident does raise important questions about Google as a desktop software vendor and its plans for rolling out future security fixes, said MacDonald. "
Well I'm just glad Google fixed the issue whether it's their fault or not.
//not that I use IE but you know still.
I don't care who's fault it is. Just fix the problem.
-Teiresias
As more and more desktop apps serve as an interface to a website, it'll become a lot easier to fix and deploy new functionality. This is a good thing.
Join the Free Software Foundation
The incident does raise important questions about Google as a desktop software vendor and its plans for rolling out future security fixes, said MacDonald.
I question Mr. MacDonald's credibility. If this is the same gentleman I'm thinking of, he's an older man who has a farm...or at least had one.
The title sounds as if Google had fixed a bug in Internet Explorer's code. Shouldn't it be "Google fixes Google Desktop bug"?
Granted, it does make it sound less like news... but I suppose it's because it isn't, really. You don't see stories like "Adobe fixes Photoshop bug", "KDE team fixes Konqueror bug", etc... since of course that's just part of the daily life in development.
The filesystem is the package manager
Well, I guess.. like "why would you go with Microsoft who sit on a vulnerability for months, instead of someone who actually fixes security holes?"
Its my understanding that this flaw has nothing to do with Google Desktop per se -- but rather was just discovered on Google. Although I'm glad they shut down the flaw where Google is concerned, it seems that it still exists for other programs -- since the security breach itself is not specific to Google.
"Since Google is providing end-user software, it must be held to the same standards that you would hold other desktop software vendors to," he said.
That's when I realized this was an article by 'The Onion'.
They fixed their code so that their Desktop Search program couldn't be used maliciously because of a flaw in IE.
"The bug was Google's... ...so why is it headlined "IE Bug"? It's not a bug in IE..."
Actually, the bug IS originally in the IE code. But Google's Desktop implementation of that code failed to address the security hole. In other words: Microsoft created the security hole and Google Desktop made it dangerous. Who's to blame? MS? Google? Both? None? You decide.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
First of all, Google did not fix an IE bug. All they did is make their own software a bit more tight in security, so that *they* are not suceptible to the IE bug. It does not *fix* it.
Second of all, the bug was *not* in Google Desktop, it *is* an IE bug, it just happens that people who use Google Desktop are vulnerable to it since it embeds IE.
But *ANY* app that embeds IE is (and remains) vulnerable, including many other pieces of software. For example, for all you poker players, if you have an account a UltimateBet, you *are* vulnerable to ths bug, and in theory someone could use it to steal your account information, which is very dangerous, since they may be able th initate withdraws from your account as well.
This is just the tip of the iceburgm there are literally hundreds of apps that embed the IE engine for rendering. All are at risk.
I think the problem was that the google's software was being run in the "Local Zone", which is almost always highly trusted. The flaw was that a site on the Internet could manipulate the toolbar. Sort of like an XSS vulnerability.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
From the article: "Even though Internet Explorer is the root cause of the vulnerability, Google's changing its Desktop Search so that it was no longer remotely accessible though the vulnerability in IE was the responsible thing for Google to do," said Gartner Research vice president Neil MacDonald.
Need an ISP in South Africa?
Who's to blame? MS? Google? Both? None? You decide.
George W. Bush, clearly.
The bug was an IE bug. Lets say there is a windows exploit out there and it has the potential to let people run arbitrary code on the victim's computer. If that code accesses e-mail files stored on the computer that have usernames / passwords / credit card information....it is not the fault of Thunderbird, Eudora, Netscape, or whatever e-mail client is running there. That isn't how they got in, they got in through the windows exploit. I'm sure google didn't fix the IE bug, they prevented people using that exploit from getting personal information from Google Desktop Search. The IE bug is still there. This will just put less pressure on Microsoft to fix their POS browser.
If I recall previous discussions correctly, the flaw was in MSIE. If that's the case, what's to prevent an attacker from exploiting the flaw with his own code?
If I remember correctly, he was far more concerned with EI than IE.
From CIO Today: The incident does raise important questions about Google as a desktop software vendor and its plans for rolling out future security fixes, said MacDonald.
"Since Google is providing end-user software, it must be held to the same standards that you would hold other desktop software vendors to," he said.
Standards? What standards would those be? Last I checked, most software manufacturers are sending out buggy copies of their code hoping you won't notice, patching it up continuously, then going ahead and doing it repeatedly. And let's not forget that Microsoft is the king of them all!
And exactly how are we to hold them to these "standards"? So many people use Microsoft routinely that they have the lion's share of the market, and their competitors are left with the spoils. And while you may not like MS, many of their programs work just well enough that you believe you've got a decent, everday product. Of course they break down, and people scream and rant, but in the end what do they do? Do they immediately switch to something else? No! They patch up their flawed software and keep the status quo.
It's a classic case of addiction, a lot like gambling but in reverse. You use the software every day and most days it works. The one time it doesn't, you fret, but because you restart it or patch it and it works, you go right back to it, rather than exploring alternatives. And Microsoft counts on this. That's why they dominate - they have everybody "addicted" to their software.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
...Shouldn't it be "Google fixes Google Desktop bug"?...
Nope. Object-orientated programming. If the api documentation says that something should operate in a certain way and it does not then by fixing the problem on your side of things it weakens encapsulation of the function and makes it easier for future bugs to accumulate as the totality of code slowly turns to spaghetti.
Shh.
This was not Google's bug. It was a flaw in IE that created the issue. All google did was make a change that would prevent the IE flaw from be accessible. IE should fix their XML flaw no matter what Google does to work around their sloppy programming.
Dick drives Jane's car.
Jane's car has a faulty parking brake.
Dick parks, engages the brake, but the car rolls away.
Dick stops parking on hills.
Important Points
Jane did not fix the parking brake
Dick did not fix the parking brake, but he no longer uses it.
Other drivers may or may not be aware of the broken parking brake.
The potential is still there for the car to roll away.
http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm#downl oad
These guys rock.
You do realise no matter how much testing a company does, there will be bugs in their software and vulnerabilities?
When a web browser and media player are "integral parts" of your O/S, you've got encapsulation problems.
Microsoft is kicking themselves for this one. They are finally given a juicy exploit that they could use to knock Google down a notch or two, but the exploit occurs because of IE's code. Microsoft's entire PR department is going, "Arrgh!" If the fault had lain anywhere else, Google would have had Microsoft-funded bad press everywhere. (And I think Slashdot would have toned down the Google love.)
Don't get me wrong. Google issued a quick (and relatively quiet) fix to cover their butts and should be given due credit. But let's not overstate the issue. Google dodged a potentially PR wrecking bullet. I just hope they're more careful in the future as the next issue may not be so easy to sweep under the carpet. Microsoft is waiting to pounce, and will do so at the first serious non-IE based error they can find in Google's chain of products.
Yes, a large part of Google Desktop will run in any browser.
But parts of the Sidebar component are rendered using an IE rendering engine. It is simple to verify if you check the references in the EXE and DLLs.
So in other words they fixed the glitch. It will work its way out naturally.
The problem is solved from your end.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I don't think it's a HUGE deal if it IS a bug in their software. Name a single company - MS, Apple, Oracle - any one - that has released bug free code to the customer.
The thing that needs to really be studied is the openness with which a vendor accpets that there is a flaw, and how quickly they solve said flaw.
Here, Google, whether partially, fully, or not at all at fault, has with expedience solved an issue that had the potential to affect their customers. Code is rarely free from bugs. An active developer base that is willing to drop all to solve a potentially dangerous bug is one I want writing my software.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
Google didn't fix the IE bug. The IE bug still exists. Only Microsoft can fix the IE bug. What Google did was put in a work around so that exploiting the IE bug won't cause a security risk in Google Desktop.
The IE bug can still affect other software.
Uhmm, not quite. We blame the one who did not do as they should have done. The reason we do not blame the compiler for a buffer overflow is the fact that the overflow resulted because the compiler acted the way it is supposed to. Instead, we blame the programmer who was not aware of this. So far, you're right.
What would you to if your program used libfoo, and libfoo turns out to have a security vulnerability in one of the functions you use? You either update to a new version of libfoo, or you try to restructure your code to avoid using the problematic function.
In this case, it would seem that Google made use of IE as it was supposed to (by API specification), but IE was not secure as it should have been, so Google decided to do it a different way. I do not see how the fault lies with Google, nor why they deserve particular praise. They found out that one of their underlying programs had a security vulnerability with no known fix, so they used a workaround to secure their application.
Microsoft on the other hand just gets a "stupid!" from me for allowing something so easily fixed to blow up in their faces like this. Way too much bad press for such a little thing.
The article notes that Google fixed it because they didn't have to update any client code (implying that if an update would be required, they wouldn't have done it). Ignoring the fact that that's not necessarily a good reason, my question is how is this possible at all? The article mentions that they simply "tightend" some setting on the main Google site. This is surprising. Google Desktop is an offline application -- you can use it when you are not on the Internet. Of course, the main way that the bug will be exploited is when you *are* on the internet and you browse a malicious site. So I have to presume that there is some file (like a .css or .html) that Desktop references from the main Google website rather than from it's local code, and that this somehow is related to the IE bug that can be exploited.
The article was completely vague on this. Anyone have more definitive information?
I'd like to clear up some of the confusion the mainstream media has caused.
The bug I found is in Microsoft Internet Explorer and not in Google Desktop. This bug remains in the browser and it is in no way fixed. This bug by itself is a pretty serious one and allows for exploitation of many sites that are not Google related.
My proof of concept code exploited Google Desktop to retrieve private information from a local machine. In order to do that I used the IE bug twice. First I used it on one of Google's sites in order to get a valid key so I can access the local web server that is Google Desktop's interface. The second time was to execute a query on the GDS server and retrieve the results.
Google basically found a quick hack that nullifies the first portion of the exploit, getting the valid key. They added the following piece of HTML code to their sites, right before the "Desktop" link is revealed: "<!--"/*"/*-->". This makes the IE CSS parser think the rest of the page is a comment so the link won't be visible while trying to read the CSS text.
The bug in IE remains at large. And GDS itself is still exploitable. If somebody found an XSS hole in one of Google's sites, he would be able to retrive the GDS key and then use the second portion of the exploit to retrieve local results.
As I said in my original article, this is a serious bug and there's no simple solution for it, at least until IE is fixed.
Matan
Google Desktop apparently uses some CSS style sheets served by their site. The IE vulnerability was in its CSS logic and thus adjusting the CSS on their server avoids the exploit from the Google Desktop vector.
--
Q
The whole bug is that there is a XSS vulnerability within the IE JavaScript engine around CSS imports. The vulnerability will let you load the contents of any other site into your own site and examin them. This is normally not allowed.
All the stuff you are describing is just details around how to use this exploit to get information from Google Desktop. But you can easily do the same thing to exploit any service who uses an embedded IE component to render data from a server, be it internal or external.
Take my Ultimate Bet example for instance. All you would need to do is have a webpage with the rogue code in it visited by the user at the same time they are logged into Ultimate Bet. You can then use the exploit to load up the user's account page (which will load fine, since they are already logged in), and get whatever the hell data you want, including withdrawing money from their account.
It's a very dangerous scenario. Someone could write a whole bunch of rogue scripts that looked for various exploitable applications to steal data, that all execute from one page. If the user happened to be running the app at that time they would be instantly screwed by visiting that page. The only reason Google Desktop is a particularly interesting target is that it is *always* running. But that is not a prerequisite for the exploit.
This article appears to be quite confused. In some way, it appears to point at google and claim somehow that the vulnerability was google's fault. Phrases like "Google Fixes Desktop Search Loophole" and "Since Google is providing end-user software, it must be held to the same standards that you would hold other desktop software vendors to" strongly imply this. In other parts the article is very explicit that the problem is an IE vulnerability that Microsoft hasn't patched.
So, which is it? Is google doing Microsoft a favor by avoiding the use of a feature that Microsoft flubbed? Or did google do something wrong in the first place? And precisely what standards are other makers of desktop software held to? The industry seems to almost gleefully accept an endless parade of the most egregious bugs from these vendors (Microsoft in particular). So, it seems that it would be meaningless to hold google to the same standard unless the complaint is that they have too few bugs.
Note that I have never worked for google or Microsoft.
Another annoyance is this sentence: "Does the researcher think he has really contributed to the security of Internet users worldwide by going public with details of the problem when no fix is available?" In the absence of any other data, that question can't be answered. If a vulnerability goes for longer than a month without the vendor fixing it, then I think a responsible security researcher has a duty to disclose the vulnerability so that people can protect themselves from it.
There is a fine balance to be struck. And as a rule, it is always a courtesy for a security research to disclose a vulnerability first to a vendor, and secondly to the net at large. It is never a requirement. If a vendor abuses the courtesy by not bothering to fix the bug, the researcher has every right (and indeed, a duty) to present the information to the public. You can be sure that people who are much more shadowy than the security researcher looking for a bit of acclaim have a good chance of already knowing about the bug, and are quietly exploiting it for themselves.
All in all, I find your article to be both too simplistic in its treatment of various issues, and confused and muddled about exactly where responsibility lies for various problems. You should be able to do better. You call yourselves 'CIO Today', and the average IT worker's biggest complaint about their bosses is how ill-informed their bosses are about technology while being absolutely certain that they know better than their employees. Perhaps this article points to the reason why.
Note that I have never worked for either Microsoft or google.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I've been as much a Google fanboy as anyone--Gmail, Google search on my Web sites and built in to my Web browser, AdSense, Blogger. Except that Blogger, owned by Google, has deleted my account with no discussion and no appeal.
I think the "not evil" ethical standards may be slipping just a bit.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE