On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 4:19 PM, Richard L. Barnes <[email protected]> wrote:
> I haven't thought much about this, but a couple of thoughts:
>
> The binary prologue means that the document is not valid HTML, so in 
> principle, it shouldn't be accepted as HTML.  It makes you wonder what other 
> stuff you could put in there that the browser would stuff into the DOM 
> without it being obvious on the wire, say, to a proxy.  I'm imagining things 
> like encrypted / compressed Javascript code that could be unpacked by the 
> more obviously HTML part of the page.

You don't have to imagine.  It's specified in HTML5.

> In a related vein, the "Text or Binary" section of 
> draft-ietf-websec-mime-sniff says that nothing scriptable must come out of 
> sniffing a binary blob.  Yet in this case, it produced "text/html", which is 
> obviously scriptable.

The browser isn't sniffing HTML in this case.  The server sent a
Content-Type header with text/html.

Adam


> On Jul 9, 2012, at 5:05 PM, Adam Barth wrote:
>
>> Why is this sniffing gone awry?  Nothing bad seems to have happened in
>> this example.
>>
>> Adam
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 1:55 PM, Richard L. Barnes <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> Related to draft-ietf-websec-mime-sniff, an example of sniffing gone awry:
>>> <http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/squirrel/>
>>>
>>> It's a valid JPEG image that contains and HTML snippet in a comment 
>>> segment.  As a result, when a browser loads the URL expecting an image, it 
>>> renders the image content, and when it expects HTML, it skips the binary 
>>> junk at the top and renders the HTML [*]. (In both cases, the server 
>>> reports Content-Type text/html.)   What's even more startling is that 
>>> Chrome helpfully adds the binary junk at the top as the first child of the 
>>> <body> element in the parsed DOM!
>>>
>>> --Richard
>>>
>>>
>>> [*] At least in Chrome 20.0.1132.47
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>
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