RE: MSIE7 browser entrapment vulnerability (probably Firefox, too)

Tested on Opera 9.20 build 8713 with JRE 1.5 resulting in the
following behaviour:

After loading the initial site (http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/ietrap/) I
couldn't navigate away to google.com etc, however Opera correctly
displayed http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/ietrap/ in the address bar, thus
no real subterfuge occured.

Regards,
perpetualmotionuk

-----Original Message-----
From: Michal Zalewski [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 1:29 AM
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: MSIE7 browser entrapment vulnerability (probably Firefox, too)

There is a cool combination-type vulnerability in MSIE7 that allows the
attacker to:

a) Trap the visitor in a Matrix-esque tarpit webpage that cannot be left
by normal means (this is a known brain-damaged design of onUnload
Javascript handlers),

b) Spoof transitions between pages so that the user thinks he actually
managed to leave the affected site, and so that the URL bar displays
other addresses we didn't actually go to.

This opens a plethora of spoofing / phishing scenarios, and is generally
quite nasty. More information and a pretty demo is available here:

http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/ietrap/

Firefox isn't outright vulnerable to this problem, but judging from its
behavior, it is likely to be susceptible to a variant of this bug (it
exhibits the same behavior, but we end up with a corrupted page instead);
I will research it once I get some sleep.

Cheers,
/mz