Re: Internet Explorer 6 DoS Bug

[Spiro Trikaliotis <trikaliotis () ivs cs uni-magdeburg de>]

Hello brett,

On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 02:42:30PM +1000, Brett Hutley wrote:

> > If you enter C:\aux in the adressline of the IE (not EXPLORER,
> > InternetExplorer) and hit enter, the window will freeze. This bug
> > is simmilar to C:\con\con
>
> The problem seems to be related to whether you have permissions to
> access the AUX device or not. I couldn't freeze explorer on my notebook
> where I don't have permissions to the aux device, but could on a
> co-workers machine in which we could access the aux device from the
> command line.

a good point.

My Win 2000 machine which did not have problems did not have any serial
devices, so it's not very surprising that this was not a problem.

On the other hand, my XP system, which had the problem, does own a serial 
port.

For a quick test, I added a serial port on Com1: to the W2K machine and 
entered c:\aux again in IE6: It freezes, too.

Could it be that the computers of the people who told us "no problems"

1. don't have a serial port,
2. don't have a COM1,
3. have a mouse on COM1,
4. have the debugger (WinDBG) on COM1, or
5. don't have a "real" COM1 but only a virtual one (for example, COM1 
   is a virtual device of the bluetooth device)?

That could explain why there are not freezes.


Furthermore, yesterday, I said that I had to log out for my machine to be
operable again, since the explorer crashed, too, and did not restart again.
With my tests today, I could not reproduce that part, explorer crashed while
killing IE, but it restarted immediately. So, this could be unrelated.

Just some more investigations from my side,
   Spiro.

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