| Title | Poor Punctuation Leads to Windows Shell Vulnerability | |
| Date | Sunday October 12 2014, @10:45PM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the you-can-quote-me-on-that dept. | ||
http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/10/poor-punctuation-leads-to-windows-shell-vulnerability/
"A class of coding vulnerabilities could allow attackers to fool Windows system administrators into running malicious code because of a simple omission: quotation marks."
The comments on the Ars Technica article are well worth reading for additional examples and descriptions. Better still, take a look at Command-injection vulnerability for COMMAND-Shell Scripts over at The Security Factory. The author provides a well-developed progression of possible attack vectors under Windows where environment variables and directory names can be used maliciously. In general, one should always surround references to %CD% (i.e. the current directory) with quotes: SET startdir="%CD%"
Another interesting case is illustrated by this code sample: SET B=T"&calc&
SET C="%B%"
where accessing the value of the environment variable B, even though it is quoted, causes the system to try and invoke a program called "calc" (i.e. the Windows calculator.)
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printed from SoylentNews, Poor Punctuation Leads to Windows Shell Vulnerability on 2026-10-06 15:42:52