On 2001-08-21, 09:42:15 (-0400), Jim Rosenberg wrote:
> Hello, sorry to pester you directly, but I posted a message about this to
> anomy-list many moons ago and never saw an answer.
Ah, sorry about that.
> What exactly is the risk with the HTML META tag that makes you defang it? I
The first thing that comes to mind is the meta-refresh command, which
can be used to trick the recipient's client into loading a new page,
thus facilitating cross-site scripting attacks, cookie abuse, web bugs
and so on. There are META sub-types which /may/ be harmless, but since
at the moment the sanitizer works on a per-tag basis, it'll need more
code to let them through.
> find this causes the sanitizer to go off on practically *every* HTML E-mail
> message, with the result that my users never bother to look at the
> sanitizer.log attachment. Is it really that dangerous? Could this be
> governed by a policy in the config file?
The next release (which I'm sitting on as I iron out some bugs in new
code) allows people to specify their own blacklisted tag list in the
configuration file. People who feel the META tag poses little risk can
simply remove it from the list.
I aim to improve the HTML defanger within the next weeks/months so it is
more intelligent about things like this, for exactly the reasons you
describe - crying wolf has problems of it's own.
-- Bjarni R. Einarsson PGP: 02764305, B7A3AB89 18171@xyz.molar.is -><- http://bre.klaki.net/Check out my open-source email sanitizer: http://mailtools.anomy.net/