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 Stephen Withers turns his gaze on the world of Apple, with
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Our Blogs Core Dump Uh-oh: Safari, IE flaws combine to put Windows at risk!
Our Blogs Core Dump Uh-oh: Safari, IE flaws combine to put Windows at risk! | Uh-oh: Safari, IE flaws combine to put Windows at risk! |
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| by Stephen Withers | |
| Monday, 02 June 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 3   
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Carpet bombing was disclosed last month by Nitesh Dhanjani after (he says) Apple told him that his private report would not be treated as a security issue. Apple: what a shame it has taken an attack devised by a researcher to prove that there’s no flaw worth leaving unpatched? The problem concerns the action a browser should take when it receives a file that cannot be rendered. Safari assumes that it was something the user requested, and downloads it to the default folder (Downloads on Mac OS X, Desktop on Windows). The alternative is to ask the user if the file should be downloaded - shades of Vista's much-criticised UAC. How you feel about that depends on how often you download files that won't open in the browser. If you rarely do it, the confirmation dialogue wouldn't appear very often and you would neither find it irritating nor habitually click the OK button without thinking. However, if you frequently download files that need to be opened in a separate program, such as Office files, then you'll quickly become accustomed to accepting the download and may click OK even when you haven't explicitly requested a file. Frankly, I don't think it makes much difference whether the browser asks for confirmation when downloading begins, or when a downloaded file is first opened (as happens in Mac OS X). Once you get into the habit of clicking OK, it's not easy to stop and think each time the warning dialogue appears unless it is in particularly unusual circumstances. So, what is the IE flaw in question, and how should it be dealt with? Please read on to page 2. |
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