Title: Netscape Navigator 'about:' Domain Information Disclosure Vulnerability
Severity: MODERATE
Description:
One of Netscape Navigator's security features is to limit information access between web pages originating from different domains. For example, if the URLs http://www.A.com/ and http://www.B.com/ were loaded in two frames, scripts run in the A frame would be unable to access form elements in the B frame.
In addition to DNS domains, Navigator considers top-level internal 'protocols' domains as well. Among these protocols is about:, which is used to access Navigator's browser cache (about:cache), history information (about:global), configuration (about:config) and information about individual documents (about:<url>).
Requesting about: for a GIF file will cause Navigator to echo the GIF's comment field. The comment is treated like a normal HTML page, meaning the contents is rendered and scripts can be run.
Due to a flaw in Navigator's security code, all URLs in the about: protocol are considered to be part of the same domain. Therefore, if a script were executed from about:http://www.X.com/Y.gif in one frame, the script would be able to examine the contents of about:global in another frame.
This issue has also been reported in commented JPEG files.
Affected Products:
- Netscape Communicator 4.7.0
- Netscape Communicator 4.72.0
- Netscape Communicator 4.73.0
- Netscape Communicator 4.74.0
- Netscape Communicator 4.75.0
- Netscape Communicator 4.76.0
- Netscape Navigator 4.0.8
- SGI IRIX 6.5.11
- SGI IRIX 6.5.12
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