Vigil@nce: IE6, address bar spoofing
October 2008 by Vigil@nce
SYNTHESIS
An attacker can use special characters in order to alter the
display of the address bar in IE6 to deceive users.
Gravity: 1/4
Consequences: disguisement
Provenance: document
Means of attack: no proof of concept, no attack
Ability of attacker: expert (4/4)
Confidence: multiples sources (3/5)
Diffusion of the vulnerable configuration: high (3/3)
Number of vulnerabilities in this bulletin: 2
Creation date: 28/10/2008
IMPACTED PRODUCTS
– Microsoft Internet Explorer
DESCRIPTION
The Internet Explorer address bar displays the url of the current
web page. Two vulnerabilities can be used by an attacker to
display a trusted url while the current web page is malicious.
An attacker can use the unbreakable character ( or U+00A0)
to force the url to be longer than the address bar. For example
"http://trusted......attacker/" will be truncated, and thus the
victim will only see "http://trusted". [grav:1/4]
An attacker may register a domain name containing a forbidden
character, such as "trus\xC2\xA9ted.dom" (which is theorically
impossible). Internet Explorer does not display forbidden
characters, so the victim would see "trusted.dom". [grav:1/4]
CHARACTERISTICS
Identifiers: VIGILANCE-VUL-8205