Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: Microsoft Windows file open without extension
From: "Michele Cicciotti" <mc () khamsa net>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 14:10:54 +0100
This only works with files connected to Microsoft Office so far. I have tested the common extensions as like xls (Excel) and doc (Word) successfully on my Microsoft Windows XP with SP2 and all the patches. It seems as like the file header is parsed in any case.
This is intended behavior
Other Microsoft products as like bmp (Paint) or txt (Notepad) are not working.
Oh, don't bother. You have stumbled on an age-old quirky behavior of Windows. Office document formats are based on a standard Windows container format, OLE structured storage files, also known as "docfiles". A docfile's name and extension are irrelevant - the file is, conceptually, a serialization of an OLE object, and like all serialization formats it contains the identifier of the application that produced it, in the form of an OLE class id (in GUID format) in this case. You can easily verify that it doesn't work with the newer Office XML formats Here, have a look at this: http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1874 Another file format well-known to be based on docfiles are Windows Installer packages, but they don't have a CompObj stream specifying the object to instantiate, so they cannot be used to pull this trick _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
Current thread:
- Microsoft Windows file open without extension Marc Ruef (Jan 23)
- Re: Microsoft Windows file open without extension Nick FitzGerald (Jan 23)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Microsoft Windows file open without extension Michele Cicciotti (Jan 23)