Georgi Guninski security advisory #27, 2000



IE 5.x Win2000 Indexing service vulnerability



Systems affected:

IE 5.x/Outlook/Outlook Express - Windows 2000 with Indexing service

started



Risk: Medium

Date: 10 November 2000



Legal Notice:

This Advisory is Copyright (c) 2000 Georgi Guninski. You may distribute

it unmodified. You may not modify it and distribute it or distribute

parts of it without the author's written permission.



Disclaimer:

The opinions expressed in this advisory and program are my own and not

of any company.

The usual standard disclaimer applies, especially the fact that Georgi

Guninski

is not liable for any damages caused by direct or  indirect use of the

information or functionality provided by this advisory or program.

Georgi Guninski, bears no responsibility for content or misuse of this

advisory or program or any derivatives thereof.



Description:



There is a security vulnerability in IE 5.x/Outlook/Outlook on Windows

2000 with Indexing service

started (it is not started by default) which allows searching for files

with specific name (wildcards are allowed) or content.

Combined with other local file reading vulnerabilities this may be

danegorous, especially the

feature of searching for files that contain certain content.





Details:

The problem is the "ixsso.query" ActiveXObject which is used to query

the Indexing service and

surprisingly it is marked safe for scripting.





The code is:



--------indexserv1.html-------------------------------------------














---------------------------------------------------------------------







Workaround:

Disable Active Scripitng or Indexing service



Demonstration is available at:

http://www.guninski.com/indexserv1.html



Vendor status:

Microsoft was contacted on 6 November



Regards,

Georgi Guninski

http://www.guninski.com