On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 07:26, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On Tue, 15 Jul 2003 08:02:56 EDT, "Richard M. Smith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > > Ah yes, the Good Time virus. What a silly idea that a virus can execute > > simply by reading an email message. Everyone knows that's > > impossible........ > > Actually, that's *STILL* impossible.
No, that used to be a popular misconception. It's always been theoretically possible for a plaintext mailreader to allow, EG, a buffer overflow. It's harder to get it wrong with a simpler mailreader, but far from impossible. Imagine reading mail text into a big buffer, and then strcpy'ing pieces out of that buffer into an array of fixed length buffers (maybe one buffer per mail message or per line), one of which gets overflowed. Sure, it's a bad thing to do. But that doesn't make it impossible. -- Dan Stromberg DCS/NACS/UCI <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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