IE 8 To Include New Security Tools

Trailrunner7 writes "Internet Explorer has been a security punching bag for years, and rightfully so. IE 6 was arguably the least secure browser of all time. But Microsoft has been trying to get their act together on security, and the new beta of IE 8, due in August, will have a slew of new security features, including protection against Type-1 cross-site scripting attacks, a better phishing filter and better security for ActiveX controls."

Better security for ActiveX controls

Or scrap ActiveX controls?

Nope, just the best one to date.

"Uninstall Internet Explorer 8? Are you sure? Yes/Yes"

Perfect security tool, IMHO.

Re:Nope, just the best one to date.

You paid $300 for use of software, I assume you got some use out of it, and later on after the shelf life of the product you want a refund not only for the full amount, but an amount higher than you initially paid for it? That's some serious optimism there. For the sake of argument, let's assume you are entitled to a refund. If you got any use out of the product at all, you are not entitled to a full refund, as you would be getting something for nothing. Even if you never were successfully able to activate (thus being entitled to a full refund), you made a conscious decision to buy the software at that price at that time, forgoing any interest you might have made on the money. If the software did work, you still wouldn't have got that interest.

Re:Nope, just the best one to date.

Technically, if they break the use of the product it is THEM that broke it. For example, if you take a car to a dealership for an oil change, and they break your transmission, the auto company/dealership is NOT immune to a lawsuit because "hey, you got usage out of the transmission".

In fact, they will have to get you the FULL value of the transmission / replace it with a fully working one. See the whole issue is that a remedy to a broken contract is supposed to set you off AS WELL OR BETTER THAN BEFORE THE DAMAGE WAS INCURRED!

Pay attention to the caps... there's a reason for them. That was originally the whole point of contracts, fulfillments and remedies in case of broken contracts. Seems that companies that deal in software are permitted to break the product and the client is to blame. Strange that. Nowhere nearly as strange as the fact that you seem to think that such things are perfectly fine. Amazing. Nothing short thereof.

Not that I care. It was one more reason why I stopped using XP period. Guess what. Unless they give me a copy of Vista FREE, I don't plan to ever go back either. Hell, since I stopped gaming I've had more spare time than I've been able to waste with a conscious effort :)

Re:Better security for ActiveX controls

ActiveX is a critical technology in (South) Korea - you can't do any online banking, online shopping, etc. without ActiveX support. MS can't drop ActiveX or it would lose the Korean market.

Re:Better security for ActiveX controls

> MS can't drop ActiveX or it would lose the Korean market.

Lose it to whom? There aren't any other ActiveX providers, so if MS dropped ActiveX, South Korea would have no choice but to use whatever MS would provide as replacement.

Re:Better security for ActiveX controls

There is an ActiveX plugin for Firefox: http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm [www.iol.ie]

Either browser could easily support ActiveX on Windows if they wanted to. The main reason they don't is for marketing reasons (because it's perceived to be insecure).

Aside from that ActiveX is actually a documented Open Group standard, and there are (were) 3rd party implementations.

Re:Better security for ActiveX controls

It isn't.

But yet every single modern browser has a way of running 3rd party binary 'plug-ins' or 'add-on' because its too damn useful. Therefore the only real distinction here between browsers that support ActiveX and browsers that don't is marketing.

Re:Better security for ActiveX controls

Actually, I'm not. If you look at that Firefox plug-in I linked above, it uses a site whitelist which makes it considerably more secure than IE. Just because IE has/had poor ActiveX security doesn't mean another browser would have the same policies.

Look at the posts in this thread. Everyone's convinced that "ActiveX==BAD" while they probably have 50 Firefox add-ins and plug-ins installed. They're the basically the same damn thing, so I'll maintain this is almost entirely a perception issue (which exists for valid, but historical reasons).

Re:Better security for ActiveX controls

Ahh yes, whitelisting. You know what would happen if Microsoft did the same thing, they'd be accused of monopolizing the ActiveX market and using their power to control who is allowed to install controls and who isn't.

There is no solution there.

Re:Better security for ActiveX controls

Or maybe South Korea could pull their collective head out and stop supporting lock-in and using crap technologies.

Re:Better security for ActiveX controls

Or scrap ActiveX controls?

Too much legacy, best thing to do is continue to sandbox them as much as possible.

MS is shoving devlopers to either Silverlight or XBAP that have extensive sandboxing/security in comparison. MS has been in the process of killing ActiveX for several years now, next trick is to smack the developers around by making non-internal deployment really freaking hard.

Even Win32/64 has been being killed off slowly, but developers are slow moving creatures sometimes. (This is the biggest reason even people that hate Vista should be rooting for it to replace XP at the very least, as the non-Win32 APIs are its bread and butter, even working directly inside the vector composer of Vista, that XP can't do even if you try running .NET 3.x on it.)

Re:Better security for ActiveX controls

ActiveX is the only thing keeping large businesses TIED to IE. The last thing MS would do is scrap them. And to be honest, within a corporate intranet (where users don't have the rights to install activex controls), ActiveX is a pretty solid technology.

Re:Better security for ActiveX controls

Neither are sandboxed and both run with the same privs as the browser AFAIK.

The only real difference is that Firefox comes with a whitelist which prevents random sites from installing add-ons.

Was I the only one to misread the title?

Was I the only one to misread the title as: "IE 8 To Include New Security Holes" ?

Re:Was I the only one to misread the title?

Was I the only one to misread the title as: "IE 8 To Include New Security Holes" ?

That's true for almost everything new. As complexity rises, so does the chance of a problem, and browsers are surprisingly complex nowadays.

Let me guess...

An 'Install Firefox' button?

Re:Let me guess...

While IE7 is still a big pile of crap, it's not QUITE as bad as IE6. Maybe IE8 will be not QUITE as bad as IE7... It could be the beginning of an underwhelming trend!

Sandbox javascript, flash etc ...

There isn't any good reason why the javascript engine should run with the same privileges as the browser, and there certainly isn't any good reason why plugins like flash should have as many privileges as they do. Sandboxing those bits should help a lot.

Re:Sandbox javascript, flash etc ...

In IE7 on Vista, those bits (and everything you do, actually) are sandboxed. It's called protected mode [microsoft.com] and like everything well-written and intelligible in life, there's a MSDN article. ~~

If you can get to a Vista machine, boot up Internet Explorer 7. In the bottom-right hand corner, you'll see a "Internet|Protected Mode: On." Internet Explorer, and everything launched in/from IE, run under a low "Integrity Level", which means they only have access to the "Temporary Internet Files\Low" folder and "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\LowRegistry" key.

Any file access is transparently redirected from these points: An ActiveX control trying to create "virus.dll" in "c:\windows\system32" will have it actually created "Temporary Internet Files\Low\C\Windows\System32". (Nothing in this folder is executable.)

Open up task manager. (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC) You'll notice an "ieuser.exe" process - should something need more privileges, like you saving a file to your downloads directory, this process will grant that one action regular, non-admin user privileges. Anything system changing has to pass through an "IEinstal.exe" process, which will trigger a UAC prompt.

My understanding is limited to some Vista beta-era documentation and the MSDN article I linked, but they pretty much sandboxed the entire browser with sub-guest-account privileges. It's relies on some new parts of the Vista kernel (you won't see the same sandboxing on IE7 in XP) but it's still pretty nifty, I think.

Technically, IE7 is the most secure browser out...

it's the only one I know that runs with only the following privileges (Vista only)...

"RO to File System"
"RW to user IE temp dir (explicit DENY on execute)"

Everything other browser runs as logged in user I believe.

So even if IE7 gets hosed into the floor, nothing will happen.

That said, it still sucks compared to FireFox 3 in terms of useful functionality, but that's another story.

Re:Please say..

It would be nice if Microsoft's biggest security "feature" is asking the user to confirm any operation that could conceivably cause a problem. Oh, well, at least they can blame the user now... after all HE allowed it.

The one time I tried to use IE7 and MSN search (to look up TV remote control codes) MSN search returned a link that hijacked IE7 to a site trying to play porno movies and because of the constant message boxes claiming "Microsoft" found security problems and should I let it install a "fix" (probably Javascript trying to get me to install malware). The message boxes wouldn't go away and I couldn't even shut down the browser without killing the whole app from the task manager. (By the way, I checked the first several pages of Google's results to see if that fake link showed up, and it wasn't there. MSN is useless, too.)

I would have never in a million years thought that IE7 would be that horrible. It's like it's 1998 all over again. Microsoft does nothing but FAIL. I've been using Firefox (with NoScript, AdBlock+, etc) since it was Phoenix 0.4 or so and I had literally forgotten how horrible IE used to be... and still is. In all those years nothing like that has ever happened to me with Firefox.

I'm convinced Microsoft just needs to give up. They have become completely worthless and literally have nothing else to offer.

More details and ranting if you're interested: http://conceptjunkie.blogspot.com/2008/04/microsoft-needs-to-die.html [blogspot.com]

Re:Please say..

Actually, you can't with Firefox 3. It will detect a looping script and give you the option of stopping it. If you use NoScript, you can block it entirely.

Re:Please say..

Maybe you could, but it's never happened to me... even before NoScript came along.

That's the irony about the Web. It started out as a document display technology and eventually morphed into an application platform, taking about 15 years too long and going down too many dead ends on the way. I read somewhere that someone suggested the Web should have simply been X from the start. It surely would have saved them reinventing the wheel a dozen times in the last 20 years, that's for sure.

We've almost come full circle. The browser is _almost_ the OS which runs your applications. In fact, Microsoft's biggest problem was that they hooked the browser directly into the OS (in fact, their problem has always been that they hook everything directly into the OS). ActiveX was just a shortcut to run native code via the Web, and it suffered all the obvious problems from being so. "Hello, world,, run anything you want on my computer. I trust you." Java was better, but it's just too darn bureaucratic. I can't imagine having to actually develop in Java... from everything I've seen it's worse than dealing with the government and insurance companies combined.

So where will it all end up? Starting around 1991, we reverted back some 15 years in UI development and had to go through the 80's again, but in browsers. I figure in another couple years Web apps and native apps will essentially be indistinguishable, especially from the non-techie's point of view. That's not bad except all the good UI standards and conventions developed by Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, Apple backed with decades of research have been almost completely abandoned. I can't even imagine what the average computer experience will be like in 10 years, but if the past 20 is an example, some things will advance more than I could have ever guessed and others will barely change, and it will still take an expert to solve all but the most basic problems.

The term "bleeding edge" was a play on the term "leading edge" but at the rate things change, there is no more "leading edge" any more. With Vista and recent releases of OSX, the "bleeding edge" is the mainstream, and we've come to not only not be surprised that systems aren't even remotely complete when shipped, in fact, we expect a "dot oh" product to be essentially a late alpha. I don't recall what product it was, but it was a "release candidate" and at the same time the release notes said in effect, "but we haven't documented all the features yet because we don't have a firm list of what will be included". That's not a "release candidate" by any definition... not even Microsoft's. That's an alpha release, by the original definitions. But these days (and Google is a perfect example, even though many of their products are very good), most software never really gets out of "beta" any more. There are Google products that were literally labelled "beta" for years. It's always possible there was some legal reason for this, but the idea of a "test version" vs. a "release version" barely exists any more. Often the only distinction is the size of the group of users who have access to it. Microsoft does this, even though they still pretend to adhere to the gigantic monolithic release after years of development apparently because that's the only way they can justify charging people for the same old crap, but shinier and slower. I think the Ubuntu concept works well. They seem to have an attitude of "We'll take what we've got and make sure it installs and works together" every six months. Each release isn't always a huge change, that depends on the state of things like Gnome, KDE or the Linux kernel or who knows what, but this "evolutionary release cycle", where each subsequent upgrade is relatively small, seems to work a whole lot better than Microsoft's "revolutionary release cycle" where it's a major IT undertaking that is so massive most companies these days would rather not bother.

Hmmm... I seem that have digressed a bit.

Re:Security, hah.

And more DRM to wade through. Much of Microsoft's current 'security' development is aimed squarely at DRM and protecting the control by businesses, not at protecting users.