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Computing News | IE7/Firefox URI Handling Bug Caused by Windows After All
Posted by: Tweaker
Date added: 22:07 Monday, 30th July 2007 GMT
Source: Beta News
An exploitable bug discovered earlier this month that was first believed to have been caused by Internet Explorer 7.0, before Mozilla was forced to admit that it afflicted Firefox as well, has apparently been traced back to a Windows API function.
The discovery may have been first revealed through the US-CERT Web site of the Dept. of Homeland Security, which now classifies it as a "Microsoft Windows URI protocol handling vulnerability." The function in question is an old favorite of malware writers: ShellExecute(), which was the subject of a notorious Windows 2000 exploit four years ago.
While Microsoft has yet to issue an official statement or bulletin making this discovery clear, it probably advised US-CERT with regard to its existence. The official government site this morning reads, "We are currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem."
While it awaits such a solution, the finger-pointing over who's responsible may continue to precede any rational discussion over who gets to fix it, as well as the impractical solution of working together to fix it.
The problem, as it now stands, seems to be this: After IE7 is installed on a system, or when a new operating system is installed with IE7 present, the ShellExecute() API function is handled differently. This is the call (or one of the calls) that a Windows application would place when it wishes to launch another application.
When a Web browser receives a URI that contains a resource identifier that obviously isn't http://, it searches the Registry for the external application associated with that identifier. It then launches the application that the Registry reports back, and passes it parameters supplied from inside the URI.
Intentionally malforming the URI is what opens up a browser to the execution of unchecked, remote binary code. Last week, Billy Rios, a senior security consultant for VeriSign , posted on his personal blog that he and a colleague were able to use the exploit to cause remote code execution in Firefox. Once IE7 is installed on a system, Firefox becomes vulnerable, as does Netscape Navigator 9 and the Mozilla open-source browser.
Story here.
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