10-19-2004, 04:19 PM
Now before everybody goes off on a tangent saying that IE sucks and Firefox/et al are way better and more secure, perhaps read this:
"While reading Larry Osterman'a blog (He's a long time Microsoftie, having worked on products dating back to DOS 4.0), I ran across this BugTraq entry on web browser security. Basically, the story is that Michael Zalewski started feeding randomly malformed HTML into Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, Lynx, and Links and watching what happened. Bottom line: 'All browsers but Microsoft Internet Explorer kept crashing on a regular basis due to NULL pointer references, memory corruption, buffer overflows, sometimes memory exhaustion; taking several minutes on average to encounter a tag they couldn't parse.' If you want to try this at home, he's also provided the tools he used in the BugTraq entry."
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/378...15/2004-10-21/0
Since it may not be obvious to all readers, be aware that when you can make a program crash by feeding it bad data, you can typically further manipulate the data you are sending it to take control of the program. That means a security hole. This is how buffer-overruns work. You can't always do it, but you can think of each way you can crash a program as a little "crack" in its exterior. If you can figure out a way to pry apart the crack, you've got yourself a hole.
So many of these "bugs" in Mozilla, Opera, Lynx, and Links are likely security holes as well.
It is interesting, then, to see that Internet Explorer did so well on this, with its notoriously bad history [trustworthycomputing.com] on security. My first instinct would be that the HTML parsing engine in Internet Explorer was written by a different team of programmers than worked on the rest of the software, and they used proper programming techniques (such as RAII [google.com] in C++, or perhaps used one of their .NET languages, rather than programming in straight C like the others) which as a side effect prevented such problems.
Let's hope that all these bugs are taken care of in the other browsers quickly before the black hats find ways to make use of them.
"While reading Larry Osterman'a blog (He's a long time Microsoftie, having worked on products dating back to DOS 4.0), I ran across this BugTraq entry on web browser security. Basically, the story is that Michael Zalewski started feeding randomly malformed HTML into Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, Lynx, and Links and watching what happened. Bottom line: 'All browsers but Microsoft Internet Explorer kept crashing on a regular basis due to NULL pointer references, memory corruption, buffer overflows, sometimes memory exhaustion; taking several minutes on average to encounter a tag they couldn't parse.' If you want to try this at home, he's also provided the tools he used in the BugTraq entry."
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/378...15/2004-10-21/0
Since it may not be obvious to all readers, be aware that when you can make a program crash by feeding it bad data, you can typically further manipulate the data you are sending it to take control of the program. That means a security hole. This is how buffer-overruns work. You can't always do it, but you can think of each way you can crash a program as a little "crack" in its exterior. If you can figure out a way to pry apart the crack, you've got yourself a hole.
So many of these "bugs" in Mozilla, Opera, Lynx, and Links are likely security holes as well.
It is interesting, then, to see that Internet Explorer did so well on this, with its notoriously bad history [trustworthycomputing.com] on security. My first instinct would be that the HTML parsing engine in Internet Explorer was written by a different team of programmers than worked on the rest of the software, and they used proper programming techniques (such as RAII [google.com] in C++, or perhaps used one of their .NET languages, rather than programming in straight C like the others) which as a side effect prevented such problems.
Let's hope that all these bugs are taken care of in the other browsers quickly before the black hats find ways to make use of them.
