From: Juergen Schmidt (juheisec.de)
Date: Sat Oct 06 2007 - 05:46:47 CDT

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Roger A. Grimes writes:

> The applications in question are accepting abitrary input and not
> validating correctly.

No -- they are handing the input over to the operating system -- which is
a reasonable thing to do for things that start with mailto|htpp|...

> How is that a Microsoft or Windows problem?

Ok, so just Microsoft and Windows:

Enter

mailto:test%../../../../windows/system32/calc.exe".cmd

in "Start/Run"

1) on a system with Windows XP and IE6. Outlook Express is executed as
expected.

2) now do the very same thing on a system with Windows XP and IE7.
calc.exe is executed.

3) Now do the very same thing on a system with Windows Vista. You get a
"... could not be found"

No 3rd party software involved, just Microsoft and Windows -- three
different reactions. That is not what I would call a reliable and therefor
secure basis for applications.

You can propably argue in favour of any of those reactions -- but not for
all of them.

bye, ju

--
Juergen Schmidt editor-in-chief heise Security www.heisec.de
Heise Zeitschriften Verlag, Helstorferstr. 7, D-30625 Hannover
Tel. +49 511 5352 300 FAX +49 511 5352 417 EMail juheisec.de
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