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Firefox, Opera Allow Phishing By Data URI Claims New Paper
hypnosec writes "A student at the University of Oslo, Norway has claimed that Phishing attacks can be carried out through the use of URI and users of Firefox and Opera are vulnerable to such attacks. Malicious web pages can be stored into data URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) whereby an entire webpage's code can be stuffed into a string, which if clicked on will instruct the browser to unpack the payload and present it to the user in form of a page. This is where the whole thing gets a bit dangerous. In his paper, Phishing by data URI [PDF], Henning Klevjer has claimed that through his method he was able to successfully load the pages on Firefox and Opera. The method however failed on Google Chrome and Internet Explorer."
I've been reading the Wikipedia entry, and if I grasp it correctly there's a distinct negative repercussion to use of them: they could apparently be used to stuff HTML elements into one "get" and possibly defeat all sorts of HTTP proxy filters, ad blockers, and other sundry Web-page tweakers in the process. If that's true, I would not be in favor of their use or support at all. I use all sorts of tools and extensions to "take back the Web"; I don't want to lose the abilities those tools enable.
sandboxing is just another layer of security, it isnt a silver bullet solution... in fact many times (like in chrome) is used as a excuse to not proper check things and do a more careless development (from the security point of view). all is well until someone finds a way to break out the sandbox (just look at the recent java security problems) and then you can use one of the many holes to hop jump the sandbox and reach the OS.
Firefox mostly dont have sandbox, but have many other proper security checks that other lack, and its secure because of then. Of course sandbox is yet another layer that should exist and they are slowly sandboxing key areas. Its harder because they want to support various OS at the same level where chrome have a full sandbox in windows but a lot weaker one in linux (see https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxSandboxing and https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxSUIDSandbox... things might be better when seccomp is enabled by default in chrome)
So yes, sandbox is good, but should not be trusted as the main security barrier in one application, other checks are always needed.
Higuita