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Microsoft Adds Selective ActiveX Filtering to IE9
An anonymous reader writes "A post on the IE blog details the new ActiveX filtering feature in the IE9 release candidate. Microsoft's Herman Ng writes, 'ActiveX Filtering in the IE9 Release Candidate gives you greater control over how Web pages run on your PC. With ActiveX Filtering, you can turn off ActiveX controls for all Web sites and then turn them back on selectively as you see fit. While ActiveX controls like Adobe Flash are important for Web experiences today for videos and more, some consumers may want to limit how they run for security, performance, or other reasons.' My favorite quote from the article is one of the image captions: 'ActiveX content may prevent you from having a good experience viewing a Web site'"
For IE, it is. For others it's a NS plugin thingy. The plugin and control are separate downloads but otherwise work much the same way once installed (except maybe tech details like wmode or IE9 hardware surface support or such).
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Both extensibility models run non-sandboxed native code on your machine. In either case, security is zero.
Don't worry, every time Microsoft plugs one hole, they add another for legacy services.
For example, look at the workarounds for installing various types of ActiveX controls -- without prompting -- on this page.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc721964(v=ws.10).aspx
Or read this page about starting elevated executables from within ActiveX -- again, without prompting.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250462(v=vs.85).aspx#wpm_elebp
Now consider the following: on Vista and Win7, all of the registry values described on these pages can be set from within the ActiveX installer itself! In other words, you can write an ActiveX component that installs, runs, and performs IPC with elevated processes. And the user will have no idea.
So if Microsoft keeps up their practice of adding holes while they plug others, then rest assured that you'll be able to continue your practice of installing viruses with minimal hassle.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Explain, in detail the differences between ActiveX and any Mozilla extension with a compiled binary XPCOM component or any nsplugin api based plugin.
Not the implementation specific but the flow of how they work.
I'm afraid you'll find that ActiveX is really no different than any other plugin system.
The problem is that ActiveX is more or less a GLOBAL, system wide plugin system versus a web browser specific api like nsplugin.
IE previously had serious problems because it would allow ActiveX controls to be downloaded and installed in a multitude of ways sometimes with the user being prompted, but due to bugs it also happened without the user ever being prompted. It defaulted to allow in early version as well, which of course is the exact wrong thing to do.
Add too that the high number of ActiveX controls that incorrectly had themselves flagged as safe to be used by websites and you have a horrible implementation ... several years ago.
Badly written ActiveX controls much be registered globally, requiring admin to install it, however properly written ActiveX controls are happy to install themselves on a per user basis. As long as you are warned and given the option to say no, there is no issue, it gives the user a way to make it work without having to go to command line to register the component or finding a gui tool to do it.
The overall features provided by ActiveX surpass pretty much every other plugin system currently implemented, they are essentially self describing DLLs that contain everything needed for any random developer to use, no source code required (which of course OSS fans don't appreciate but thats another story entirely).
Unfortunately, even with the extra things built into ActiveX (like the ability to flag it as unsafe for use in untrusted environments like a web browser, Microsoft fucked up the original implementation and didn't fix it for years, and then it took them several years to make it actually fix all of the major problems.
ActiveX controls no longer install without multiple clicks of user interaction. Its easier to get owned with a gecko based application such as Firefox or Thunderbird than it is with IE, it takes fewer clicks.
Yes, there are a lot of shitty, broken ActiveX controls, no argument there, but to say 'ActiveX is bad' is like saying 'plugins are bad' because thats all they are.
Microsoft has COM, which ActiveX is built on (And the entire .NET framework as well), Mozilla uses XPCOM, and you can generate code for both from the same IDL file if its fairly simple.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Mod parent up +1 informative.
You've hit on the key difference between ActiveX and NPAPI - for NPAPI, the user has to download and install the plugin outside the browser, which means that an attacker couldn't guarantee that a particular plugin was present. For ActiveX, a web page could cause the plugin to be installed automatically which meant that an attacker could be sure that a plugin was present. Of course the code that allowed for silent installs has been gone for the better part of a decade but as you said, old painful memories die hard.
Badly written ActiveX controls much be registered globally, requiring admin to install it, however properly written ActiveX controls are happy to install themselves on a per user basis. As long as you are warned and given the option to say no, there is no issue, it gives the user a way to make it work without having to go to command line to register the component or finding a gui tool to do it.
Here's the problem I have with this statement. Sure, you can write secure ActiveX if you know what you're doing. But in my experience, most still-being-written ActiveX code seems to be put together by poorly trained coders who, back in 2003, took a 2-day free Microsoft course "how to quickly and easily write intranet apps" and who have never updated their skillset since then. Those intranet developers who HAVE updated their skills stopped using ActiveX when it became obvious that being tied to IE-only development was not a good long-term strategy for numerous reasons - everything they've done in the last several years has been more of a LAMP-style model (even if it's on a Windows server with MS SQL behind it) that works with any reasonably recent client browser and doesn't treat HTTP as just a delivery platform for transferring Windows applications from server to desktop.
#DeleteChrome
"the ActiveX Installer Service checks whether the URL requesting the ActiveX control installation is approved in Group Policy." The URL has to be approved (by the administrator of the PC) before active-x can be auto-installed. You did know this right? The second link talks about making your own broker process to bypass IE sandbox, but you need again code running (and authorized by the user) on the box first.
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds