Week 29 2013

In our Security Disaster of the Week, H. Marco and Ismael Ripoll found out that all applications statically linked and compiled via glibc since 2006 have their pointers protected by being XORed with zero. Exploit mitigation at its finest.

My favorite type of browser vulnerability remains the good old Same-Origin Policy (SOP) bypass: Usually the SOP enforces a virtual boundary in which web sites are allowed to include content from other domains (scripts, displaying images) but prevented from accessing the actual content. If the SOP is bypassed, your gmail inbox leaks. A good example is Armin Razmdjou's finding: Attackers can abuse a playlist API in the Windows Media Player browser plugin to read contents from arbitrary web pages. Specifying a URL within the same origin that redirects to the interesting site will satisfy WMP's SOP. Reading the playlist's content then reveals the HTML source code. Tada!

Zane Lackey and Omar Ahmed of the Etsy Security Team analysed SSL traffic to see which CAs are actually required in their day to day business. Their data could be used to reduce the set of trusted CAs to a minimum.

Matt Wobensmith of Mozilla's QA started submitting code to the Content Security Policy (CSP) test suite for the W3C Web Application Security Working Group, Thanks!


If you find a mistake in this article, you can submit a pull request on GitHub.

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