Media Accuracy

Jeff Weinstein jsw at netscape.com
Wed Oct 18 17:48:54 PDT 1995


Martin Diehl wrote:
> 
>      In the October 16, 1995 issue of PC Week, Spencer F. Katt writes:
> 
>      >Isn't it ironic?  Andreessen creates the WEB while in college; now
>      >college students are finding all the holes in it.  Two students have
>      >uncovered a serious bug in Netscape Navigator, one Katt source
>      >contends.  The browser has a 2K-byte buffer for reading HTML
>      >documents.  Well, these tipsters found that once the page has sent
>      >more than 2K, any assembly code in the HTML document will be
>      >executed.  As an experiment, these kids set up a simple Web server
>      >with some assembly code embedded in the HTML page to overwrite the
>      >client computer's FAT table [sic].  Sure enough, it worked.
> 
>      >spencer at pcweek.ziff.com
> 
>      He might be talking about the (already fixed) bug that allowed an HREF
>      that is longer than 356 bytes to overwrite the stack.  Hadn't heard
>      here that anything would happen other than getting Netscape to crash.
>      No names or URL's were given in the story.  Maybe he needs an update.
>      Maybe we need an update.

  As far as I can tell, this is just an inaccurate re-reporting of
Ray's buffer overflow hack, which we fixed in our security patch.
 
	--Jeff

-- 
Jeff Weinstein - Electronic Munitions Specialist
Netscape Communication Corporation
jsw at netscape.com - http://home.netscape.com/people/jsw
Any opinions expressed above are mine.






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