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Rating the Bush and Kerry Web sites on security
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 27 Jun 2004 17:50:11 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: "Richard M. Smith" <rms () computerbytesman com> Date: June 27, 2004 5:45:30 PM EDT To: dave () farber net Subject: Rating the Bush and Kerry Web sites on security Hi,To rate George Bush and John Kerry on the Homeland Security issue, I just
completed two quick security audits of the official Bush(http://www.georgewbush.com/) and Kerry (http://www.johnkerry.com/) campaign
Web sites. Unfortunately, I found problems at both Web sites. Here are the results of my testing so far:1. Both the Bush and the Kerry Web sites have cross-site scripting errors (XSS). These errors can allow a prankster to create fake Web pages which load from the Bush or Kerry Web sites but additional content can be supplied
from a different Web server belonging to a prankster. A prankster couldthen say anything they want on a Bush or Kerry Web page using a XSS error. Examples include fake news stories, slogans telling visitors to vote for the
other candidate, and doctored photos of a candidate.2. Error trapping at the Kerry Web site isn't very good. Typing unusual
characters into Web forms at the Kerry Web site causes Web serverapplications to fail and a visitor is shown very cryptic error pages. These problems might be a sign of SQL injection errors which can be quite serious. An SQL injection error can sometimes be used by an outsider to break into a backend database at a Web site and then to make off with private information
from the database.3. The Bush Web site has hired a company called Omniture to track users at
the Bush Web site. Omniture uses hidden Web bugs to do this tracking. Perhaps this Web site feature was requested by John Ashcroft? ;-) Thisrelationship with Omniture is not spelled out in the Bush Web site privacy policy. For more about information about Omniture, check out their Web site
at http://www.omniture.com/company.html.4. Both the Bush and Kerry Web sites encourage visitors to add banner ads
for the candidates to their own Web pages. The Bush banner ad uses JavaScript supplied from the Bush Web server (Seehttp://www.georgewbush.com/WStuff/BPAdFeed.aspx). The Kerry banner ads use
an embedded IFRAME (See http://www.johnkerry.com/download/promos.html). Both banner ad schemes allow the campaigns to track visitors to any Webpages where the banner ads appear. In addition, the Bush JavaScript scheme allows the Bush Web server to run any script code inside of other people's
Web pages. This scheme doesn't strike me as a very good idea from a security standpoint. 5. Both candidates have good Web site privacy policies. For some oddreason, the Kerry Web site privacy policy is also certified by Truste and
BBBOnline. 6. It appears that the open source vs. closed source debate has alsoentered the presidential campaign. The Kerry home page comes from an Apache Web server running on a Red Hat Linux box. The Bush Web site on the other hand is hosted on a more corporate Microsoft-powered IIS 5.0 server and uses
ASP.NET. I did not check to see if this IIS server is up to date with Microsoft security patches. If anyone else runs across anything interesting at these two Web sites, please let me know. Richard M. Smith http://www.ComputerBytesMan.com ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- Rating the Bush and Kerry Web sites on security David Farber (Jun 27)