Save the Developers!
Please Stop Using IE6 and save a lot of time for the web developers.
This project aims to upgrade microsoft web browser to higher platform from IE 7 to IE 8 or download alternative browser. IE7 has been arounb but majority of the web browser used by user is still IE6. many of these are Universities and School, who has XP installed and not yet upgraded to Vista, or waiting for the release of Windows 7 later this year.
The problem is IE6 dont follow web standards, many sites are messed up through IE6 browser. I personally hate to create a second css file to hack IE6 rendering.
save us some time to be more productive...or go to this site
The main problem is i have to install IE tester on vista just to simulate IE6, IE 5.5, IE 7, IE 8 for my projects, removing IE lower versions would be a real relief. heheheXD...
Researcher cracks Mac in 10 seconds at PWN2OWN, wins $5k
Charlie Miller defends his title; IE8 also falls on Day One of hacking contest
March 18, 2009 (Computerworld) Charlie Miller, a security researcher who hacked a Macintosh in two minutes last year at CanSecWest's PWN2OWN contest, improved his time today by breaking into another Macintosh in under 10 seconds.
Miller, an analyst at Independent Security Evaluators in Baltimore, walked off with a $5,000 cash prize and the MacBook he hacked.
"I can't talk about the details of the vulnerability, but it was a Mac, fully patched, with Safari, fully patched," said Miller on Wednesday, not long after he had won the prize. "It probably took five or 10 seconds." He confirmed that he had researched and written the exploit before he arrived at the challenge.
The PWN2OWN rules stated that the researcher could provide a URL that hosted his exploit, replicating the common hacker tactic of enticing users to malicious sites where they are infected with malware. "I gave them the link, they clicked on it, and that was it," said Miller. "I did a few things to show that I had full control of the Mac."
Two weeks ago, Miller predicted that Safari running on the Macintosh would be the first to fall.
PWN2OWN's sponsor, 3Com Corp.'s TippingPoint unit, paid Miller $5,000 for the rights to the vulnerability he exploited and the exploit code he used. As it has at past challenges, it reported the vulnerability to on-site Apple representatives. "Apple has it, and they're working on it," added Miller.
According to Terri Forslof, manager of security response at TippingPoint, another researcher later broke into a Sony laptop that was running Windows 7 by exploiting a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8. "Safari and IE both went down," she said in an e-mail.
TippingPoint's Twitter feed added a bit more detail to Forslof's quick message: "nils just won the sony viao with a brilliant IE8 bug!"
Forslof was not immediately available to answer questions about the IE8 exploit.
TippingPoint will continue the PWN2OWN contest through Friday, and will pay $5,000 for each additional bug successfully exploited in Safari, Internet Explorer 8, Firefox or Google's Chrome. During the contest, IE8, Firefox and Chrome will be available on the Sony, while Safari and Firefox will be running on the MacBook. The researcher who exploited IE8 will, like Miller, be awarded not only the cash, but also the laptop.
"It was great," said Miller when asked how it felt to successfully defend his title. "But I was really nervous for some reason this time. Maybe it was because there were more people around. Lucky [the exploit] was idiot-proof, because if I had had to think about it, I don't know if I'd had anything."
This year's PWN2OWN also features a mobile operating system contest that will award a $10,000 cash prize for every vulnerability successfully exploited in five smartphone operating systems: Windows Mobile, Google's Android, Symbian, and the operating systems used by the iPhone and BlackBerry.
Miller said he won't enter the mobile contest. "I can't break them," said Miller, who was one of the first researchers to demonstrate an attack on the iPhone in 2007, and last year was the first to reveal a flaw in Android. "I don't have anything for the iPhone, and I don't know enough about Google."
CanSecWest, which opened Monday, runs through Friday in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Gazelle - To end Internet Explorer Line
The browser, called Gazelle, relies on 5,000 lines of C# code called a "browser kernel" that helps enforce security rules to prevent malicious access to the PC's underlying operating system, according to a recently publishedpaper.
So far, Gazelle is just a prototype, with other parts of the browser based on Microsoft's IE. Due to the complex nature of the way it processes Web pages for better security, the browser's performance is more tortoise than gazelle, but the researchers think a few tweaks can make it faster.
Gazelle is different from some other browsers in that it considers each part of a Web site - such as iframes, subframes and plugins - as separate elements. Some of those elements can pull in malicious content from other Web sites. Google's Chrome runs a Web page and its elements in a single process.
The Microsoft researchers argues that their approach brings more reliability and better security since processes can't interact with the underlying system and are mediated by system calls supplied by the browser kernel.
In the paper, the Microsoft researchers are surprisingly critical of the company's forthcoming Web browser, IE8, which uses an approach similar to Chrome by using tabs to isolate processes.
"This granularity is insufficient since a user may browse multiple mutually distrusting sites in a single tab, and a web page may contain an iframe with content from an untrusted site (e.g., ads)," the paper reads.
Gazelle goes so far as to separate elements of a Web page that come from the same registrar-controlled domain. For example, content from ad.datacenter.com and user.datacenter.com would be considered separate, whereas Chrome "puts them into the same site instance," the paper said.
Blocking race condition attacks
Another interesting feature of Gazelle is aimed at blocking so-called race condition attacks. In that scenario, an attacker creates a Web page aimed at making a user click on an area of the page. But just before the predicted click happens, an overlay is drawn into the page, which could cause a user to be attacked.
Gazelle will ignore any clicks in newly exposed screen areas for about one second until a user can see the new screen areas.
Gazelle also aims to limit the dangers posed by programming flaws in browser plugins. Plugins are small bits of code that enable other programs to run within a browser, but they've also been known to contain vulnerabilities that can allow a PC to be hacked.
In Gazelle, the plugins are sandboxed, or isolated from the rest of the system, so that a bad plugin would only affect the particular Web page's plugin process and not the whole PC.
But one huge problem with Gazelle's approach is that existing plugin code would have to be rewritten or ported to interact with Gazelle's browser kernel system calls. That's difficult since plugins are written by a wide variety of software vendors whose development schedules don't necessarily work in perfect sync with those of browser developers.
Other parts of Gazelle borrow from IE code not related to security. For example, the researchers said they didn't want to write a new HTML parser, so they used IE7's Trident renderer and JavaScript engine.
In compatibility tests, Gazelle correctly rendered 19 of the top 20 sites ranked by Web survey firm Alexa.
The paper warns that the new security of Gazelle does introduce "performance overhead" - especially for sites such as the New York Times Web site - but further work should be able to make it faster.
