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Ray Ozzie on ‘Simple Sharing Extensions’

by | Nov 21, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

An interesting post from Ray Ozzie – one of the most influential people to have joined Microsoft in the last five years.

I’ll paraphrase by stealing quotes:

Each of us has a mix of private, shared, and public events and meetings that we’re tracking.
Some of these we edit privately and publish to others.
The most challenging calendars we deal with are those that are “shared”
It’s tough because we use a mix of different email/calendaring systems
And the same goes for contact lists.

Sounds familar!

What we really longed for was “the RSS of synchronization” … something simple that would catch on very quickly.
so we created an RSS extension that we refer to as Simple Sharing Extensions or SSE.

Fair enough – another MS developed extension. Wait – there’s more:

We’re releasing the SSE specification under a Creative Commons license – Attribution-ShareAlike. I’m very pleased that Microsoft is supporting the Creative Commons approach; you can see more about this at in the licensing section at the end of the spec.

Now that’s smart.

Hopefully some of these concepts will be adopted in main-stream products; more cutting edge projects like Hula should be all over this.

My main concern is still around security and authorisation – I don’t want to send a private calendar to a colleague – for it to be shared publically. That’s a real problem with things like this.

Internet Explorer – another unpatched vulnerability

by | Nov 21, 2005 | evilzenscientist, patching, Uncategorized

SANS are flagging a particularly nasty Internet Explorer problem:

the UK group “Computer Terrorism” released a proof of concept exploit against patched versions of Internet Explorer. We verified that the code is working on a fully patched Windows XP system with default configuration.

The bug uses a problem in the javascript ‘Window()’ function, if run from ‘onload’. ‘onload’ is an argument to the HTML tag, and is used to execute javascript as the page loads.

The Javascript Window() vulnerability has been known for a few months now, but it has so far been treated as a denial of service (DoS) vulnerability. The author of this PoC figured out a way to use this older vulnerability to execute code.

Impact:
Arbitrary executables may be executed without user interaction. The PoC demo as tested by us will launch the calculator (calc.exe).

In addition ot the PoC ‘Calculator’ exploit, a reader (thanks Chris R!) submitted a version that opens a remote shell. The PoC exploit allows for easy copy/paste of various shell code snippets.

In itself, the vulnerability will not escalate privileges. We are trying to verify other exploits at this point.

Mitigation:
Turn off javascript, or use an alternative browser (Opera, Firefox). If you happen to use Firefox: This bug is not affecting firefox. But others may. For firefox, the extnion ‘noscript’ can be used to easily allow Javascript for selected sites only.

Looks nasty. Fully patched Windows XP and IE 6 is at risk from this one; turning off javascript is going to break a lot of new sites..

As the man said – make sure you use Firefox or Opera.