RSS and Web Feeds a Risk?

A followup whitepaper [PDF] to a recent talk at the blackhat security conference has been released outlining the risks associated with web based feeds such as RSS and Atom. From the article: "Attackers could exploit the problem by setting up a malicious blog and enticing a user to subscribe to the RSS feed. More likely, however, they would add malicious JavaScript to the comments on a trusted blog, Auger said. "A lot of blogs will take user comments and stick them into their own RSS feeds," he said."

Comments

Re:Old technique, new medium

[darkewolf]

Funnily enough, part of an extension to a project the company I am at is working on, is for users to be able to import their external blog feeds into the blog on the site. Basically so they don't need to type the same blog information in two different places. Easy to do. And even before looking at the output of some places like BlogSpot, it was mandated to sanitize the output to using just basic HTML (P, BR, stripped down IMG, stripped down A) and nothing else. Yes, they will lose some formatting that places like blogspot allows, but so much saner.

So in the real world, a lot of sensible developers understand the problem with risky external input, although lots of baby-developers haven't had enough experience to get jaded and never trust users. Security thoughts come from age and being cynical.

But either way, the Web2.0 look irks me :P

Color me stupid...

[Zaphod2016]

...but why would anyone *want* to include JavaScript in an RSS feed? Other than showing ads or annoying viewers, what possible purpose would it serve?

And, as someone above suggested, what the hell is a "Web 2.0" RSS feed? Even if I used AJAX to make a nice-n-pretty UI for my blog, that still wouldn't explain why I would use JavaScript for my RSS feed.