Guest Grim Reaper Posted December 20, 2003 Report Share Posted December 20, 2003 The third-party 'open source' patch for Internet Explorer that we told you about earlier today, contains more than a few potentially nasty surprises. As we noted, German tech site Heise had already warned of dangerous buffer overflows. Openwares.org, a month-old site which boasts "Software is free" today published source code and a binary executable purporting to fix a loophole in Internet Explorer for Windows. It's unusual, but not unprecedented, for third parties to issue their own fixes for Microsoft's exploit-riddled browser. But Heise advises that this patch could be more trouble than it's worth, and the fix has already been taken in for some maintenance. "This patch addresses a vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer that could allow Hackers and con-artists to to display a fake URL in the address and status bars. The vulnerability is caused due to an input validation error, which can be exploited by including the "%01" and "%00" URL encoded representations after the username and right before the "@" character in an URL," according to a release note accompanying the patch. Unfortunately, the authors of the patch also enabled a Windows Registry key used by spyware. IEmsg.dll. "When we're absulotly [sic] sure that the code is bulletproof we'll re-release it," says Openwares's forum administrator. There's little that could make Microsoft's security and patching mechanisms look good right now. But this could just do the trick.source: the register Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ash Posted December 20, 2003 Report Share Posted December 20, 2003 Yeah, the Slashdot readers took it apart and spotted a potential 256byte buffer overflow. Could be sloppy code, intentional, who knows. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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