[This was originally published on the Mozilla bug tracker and touched up for style and mirrored on attrition.org. VulnDB 8323.]
User-Agent: Firefox/0.9.2 (Windoze XP; U) [en]
Build Identifier: Firefox/0.9.2 (Windows XP; U) [en]
“Load URLs typed into the address bar in new tabs” is selected (not sure if this is part of Tabbrowser Preferences 0.6.5 extension or native to Firefox. When I type in a new URL, it will load the page in a new tab as expected. However, the remote web will receive the href as URL of the previous tab, regardless of their relation.
Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
- load http://www.one.com into tab
- type http://www.two.com into address bar
- check web log of site two.com and notice href of hit shows one.com as referrer
Actual Results:
forced ~# tail -f /home/admin/access_log | grep spleh
216.38.219.236 – – [21/Jul/2004:04:50:49 -0400] “GET /spleh HTTP/1.1” 404 1932
“http://arbitrary.net/” “Firefox/0.9.2 (Windoze XP; U) [en]”
Notice that “arbitrary.net” shows in the HREF field here, even though that site (changed for this report) does not link to the site with this log. it is inheriting the href from the previous tab in Firefox that i was looking at.
Expected Results:
If I manually type a URL into the address bar, it should show no href, just a direct page load.
forced ~# tail -f /home/admin/access_log | grep spleh
216.38.219.236 – – [21/Jul/2004:05:10:43 -0400] “GET /spleh HTTP/1.1” 404 1906
“-” “Opera/6.03 (Windows 2000; U) [en]”
I flagged this as ‘security’ related because in some instances, there is a chance a user may disclose sensitive information from one tab to a remote site without realizing it. If the URL/HREF carries any sensitive information such as session ID, login names, private web space, etc… it would be disclosed to the remote site.