-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Friday 06 September 2002 19:19, William_dw -- Sqlcoders wrote:
> > > >As a final thought, couldn't we just work around deficiencies like
> > > >that? What happens if you send "text/x-really-plain" instead?
> > > >
> > > >--
> > > >Robbe
> > >
> > > As far as I've found IE really likes HTML, unless it pop's up a file
> > > download box it will try to interpret any HTML looking text in the file
>
> i'm
>
> > > afraid.
> >
> > If IE is detected, FProxy could make an HTML document with a large
>
> <TEXTAREA>
>
> > (say, 70 cols and 25 rows) and put the actual document in that.  Surely
> > IE won't parse HTML inside a <TEXTAREA>.  Or would it?
>
> This is just a thought, but...
>
> If I wanted to be malicious I could simply add a </textarea> to the start
> of my documents, which would let me put in other HTML elements and have
> them processed in browsers that can process HTML.
<>

Ahh, excelent point.  I tried coming up with a few ways around this:

1)  Removing any HTML tags, or at least any </TEXTAREA> tags
2)  Replacing '<' with '&lt;'
3)  Use JavaScript to place the text into an empty <TEXTAREA> (we know they're 
using IE, so it's not a problem of compatibility)

For 1, you get rid of perfectly good uses of HTML in a text document (what if 
it's a plaintext document about learning HTML?)  It is even problematic if 
limited to just </TEXTAREA> tags.

For 2, it is unknown how IE will render this (at least it is for me).  Also, 
Java lacks a good search-and-replace function (though this can be worked 
around).  Someone will have to test this to see what happens.

For 3, at first I thought of something like this:

<form name="text">
        <textarea name="plain" rows="25" cols="70"></textarea>
</form>
<script type="javascript">
        document.text.plain.value = "text to add";
</script>

But this just changes the attacker's problem to using '";</script>' instead of 
'</textarea>'.  So I thought of more sophisticated solutions, like using 
remote scripting to have the browser grab the text while it's executing the 
JavaScript.  This set off my internal over-engineering alarm.

- -- 
If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a 
Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, 
and explode once a year killing everyone inside.
                --Robert Cringely, InfoWorld
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.4 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

iEYEARECAAYFAj15f2oACgkQqpueKcacfLSbogCgl2DPPjdXdMKNPxHg9W1cn4t/
Jz0AoMWKT8OaoUMRzNhMJRk7eZw5WT1D
=TF3B
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


_______________________________________________
devl mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://hawk.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl

Reply via email to