Article 1306 of comp.lang.java.security:
> From: "Richard M. Smith" <rms@pharlap.com>

>                       I know of at least three
> commercially available ActiveX controls which have
> methods which will save files to disk.  Any of these
> controls, I believe, can be exploited to build
> a disk crash HTML page.

There has been, and quite possibly still is, at least one
commercially-available ActiveX control which has a method
to execute arbitrary system commands!  I discussed the possible
security implications of this with the maker of the control,
and they said basically that users would just have to be
careful not to allow that control to be invoked by an
untrusted page.  Interesting security model...

I suspect that the major impact of ActiveX security problems
will not be directly malicious controls (since people may learn
not to accept unsigned controls, and bad guys may be unwilling
to sign their malicious ones), but rather bad guys exploiting
accidental security problems in signed/trusted controls.

Corrections welcome; I wouldn't mind being wrong on this!  *8)

The contrast with Java, of course, is that in the Java case
you only have to trust the JVM and its SecurityManager, not
every individual applet that you accept.  Or are there ways
that an attacker might use Java to exploit the fact that
you've previously accepted and assigned some trust to some
other app/applet?  I'm not sure about that...

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David M. Chess
High Integrity Computing Lab
IBM Watson Research
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