Internet Explorer 7 has caused a lot of hype lately. It just recently became public and people are already finding some very minor bugs in it. The thing most people haven't looked at is how IE7 deals with some of the older bugs. It seems like IE7 has done a lot to improve. For instance now when active content is displayed on a page A dialog will come up asking you if you want to run the control and it will also give you some information about the control. ActiveX controls have been the biggest source of vulnerabilities in IE. With this feature atleast users can have some idea what it is they are enabling the website to do.

IE 7 seems to have been designed with security in mind. Although theres some features which were added which in my opinion sound like bad ideas from a security stand point. XAML is one technology being put into IE7. XAML is a markup language which is useful for creating user interfaces. By incorporating XAML into IE7 Microsoft has come up with what they call XBAP. XBAP is a .NET binary which can be rendered inside of IE7. They have considered security in this case by adding a sandbox around the binary. The interesting thing is that the idea of XBAP is so complex and it takes ideas from so many other technologies which have inheriently had security issues that this idea is bound to be buggy. Another interesting point is that the UI elements created from XAML will be vector graphics rendered using DirectX. This seems interesting as many of the DirectX vulnerabilities in the past were not such a big deal because they only seemed to affect people who played video games or had malicious local users on their machine.

I'm sure theres other interesting things in IE7 which might be useful to look at as well. Just recently someone found a interesting bug which could be used to spoof a link to a SSL site and make the site seem like it has an invalid SSL certificate. This alone while a very minor bug could be used in some sophisticated attacks.

Another interesting this is that IE7 allows you to manage ActiveX controls and it allows you to enable or disable them at will. However one thing which does standout is that there are some ActiveX controls which are in the list which can be used without authorization from the user. If theres a vulnerability in any of these default controls that would be rather disasterous.

The internet is a dangerous place. Users keep wanting new flashy features. Until a feature has been tested extensively and been reviewed and beta tested for an extended period of time those fatures should not be added to software which already has its problems. I think Internet Explorer definately does not spell the end of IE 0-day and I truely feel we will be seeing a lot of interesting and new vulnerabilities in it.

Internet Explorer 7 has its upsides and its downsides its gonna be a fun journey indeed.