Re: viewvc security flaw?

[Robert Buchholz <rbu () gentoo org>]

On Friday, 19. September 2008, Josh Bressers wrote:
> I'm not sure about this one, I'm wondering if someone else has an
> opinion: http://viewvc.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=354
>
> It was submitted as a Fedora security update, which I'm letting through
> for now, as better safe than sorry.
>
> To sum it up, it looks like the mime type used to display a given file
> in viewvc can be set via the URL.  Obviously this means that an attacker
> could force an arbitrary mime type on any file in a viewvc repository.
>
> It strikes me as not crossing a trust boundary though, as I suspect
> you'd need something malicious in the repo in order for this to really
> be useful.  If the bad guys can already add arbitrary content, you have
> bigger problems.

We also just received this report as upstream announced it as a security 
issue. Nevertheless, I would follow your argument. A crafted link could at 
worst case crash the browser. But as far as I can imagine nothing inside 
the repository can be exploited by changing its mime-type at delivery.

Robert

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