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How To Evade URL Filters With (Not-So) Fancy Math
Trailrunner7 writes "In their constant quest to find new and interesting ways to abuse the Internet, attackers recently have begun using an old technique to obfuscate URLs and IP addresses to bypass URL filters and direct users to malicious sites. The technique takes advantage of the fact that modern browsers will allow users to specify IP addresses in formats other than base 10. So a typical IP address that looks something like this — 192.10.10.1 — can also be written in base 8, hexadecimal or a handful of other formats, and the browser will recognize it and take the user to the specified site. What is interesting though is that due to the relative obscurity of using such methods to denote an IP or URL, it is quite feasible that existing security products do not correctly identify the URLs as valid or flag them as malicious when they point to existing known bad websites."
The linked article is next to worthless. The real details are in this blog post.
I actually preferred using a url with the 10 digit number that was my base 10 IP address in E-Mails as it got people's attention in an otherwise bland sea of domains. This has been a feature of libc as long as I can remember (in Linux you should be able to ping an IP address in some other number base) but Firefox actually makes an effort to disallow using IP addresses with this notation. So if they're using Firefox, it won't work so well.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That's the same combination I have on my luggage!
It doesn't matter which way you enter the address into your browser, it still resolves to the same IP. If that IP is blocked, you won't get through even if you use this method.
FTFA:
In other words, no testing has been done at all. What is this poorly-thought-out bit of speculation doing on the front page of Slashdot?
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
You can't just do things like this based on the syntax of the input, but rather on the semantics. In this case, to properly block the URLs, you need to parse them and transform them into an abstract representation of what they mean, e.g. a struct that encodes the protocol, host, port, document and query strings, and then examine the parse result to check if it matches the rule.
The IT industry just systematically fails this over and over, because of people's bad habit of doing shit with regular expressions instead of parsing and semantic analysis. See, for example, the gazillion ways that people get around cross-site scripting filters; or if you want to see it from the other angle (generation instead of parsing), see SQL injection.
Are you adequate?
The problem with this approach is that the requested URL doesn't provide a hostname, just the IP address. As IP addresses are in short supply, it has been an extremely common practice for years to assign multiple websites to a single IP address, otherwise known as name-based virtual hosting. This is common even for large companies. When you specify the URL with an IP address, the browser doesn't provide an appropriate Host: HTTP header, so any web server set up this way won't know which of the many websites it hosts should be returned. This means that anybody browsing the web with this technique will find that some websites work and some won't, seemingly at random to them.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Who thought it was a good idea to allow IP addresses to be entered in so many different formats? Who are you to decide that 0x01 is not a domain name? This is a feature which is hardly ever going to be used legitimately, but the code must be written and tested. KISS. Keep it simple, stupid.
I'm glad Slashdot is here to tell us about these things, or else I might not have found this important security bulletin.
We must have had 20 different ways to get to goatse.cx.
I didn't need 20 different ways. I just had it bookmarked for quick and easy viewing.
The author apparently does not realize this, but you can also partly concatenate octets and mix various notations:
http://0x4a.8196963/
And yes, congratulations on being cutting edge: this thing is so old and well-known that it's even explicitly covered in RFC 3986, section 7 ("Security Considerations"), subsection 7.4 ("Rare IP Address Formats").