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IE and Firefox Share a Vulnerability

Posted by kdawson on from the upload-with-daring-and-whimsy dept.

hcmtnbiker writes with news of a logic flaw shared by IE 7 and Firefox 2.0. IE 5.01, IE 6, and Firefox 1.5.0.9 are also affected. The flaw was discovered by Michal Zalewski, and is easily demonstrated on IE7 and Firefox. The vulnerability is not platform-specific, but these demonstrations are — they work only on Windows systems. (Microsoft says that IE7 on Vista is not vulnerable.) From the vulnerability description: "In all modern browsers, form fields (used to upload user-specified files to a remote server) enjoy some added protection meant to prevent scripts from arbitrarily choosing local files to be sent, and automatically submitting the form without user knowledge. For example, '.value' parameter cannot be set or changed, and any changes to .type reset the contents of the field... [in this attack] the keyboard input in unrelated locations can be selectively geared toward input fields by the attacker."

2 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Nope by TheLink · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, in theory it's just for fishing a particular file with the filename that you type.

    I'm not too worried about it, because in my office I use Linux and I run WinXP in a virtual machine, in that VM I use a nonadmin account for normal stuff - viewing and priting Word or Excel docs, instant messaging, AND I use the Run As feature to launch browser windows as yet another different nonadmin account. On the Linux host itself, I run firefox as a different user from my main user account.

    So if I gather correctly, you can grab my bookmarks or downloaded files, IF I actually type all the letters to those specific paths? That's it?

    I'd be more worried about Windows graphic driver exploits - graphics drivers seem a bit shoddy- plus they are all about performance, not security. And currently it's basically - Nvidia, ATI and Intel.

    I've had weird things happen with Linux sound though so I wonder about the security of such stuff. I've pretty much given up on getting Linux sound to work properly for sustained periods of time (this on suse 10.0, perhaps I should try 10.2).

    --
  2. Works on FireFox under Linux by smiggly · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It just takes a few changes. Try this:

    http://www.thanhngan.org/fflinuxversion.html