New Zero-Day Vulnerability In Windows

Jimmy T writes "Microsoft and Secunia are warning about the discovery of a new 'Zero-day' vulnerability affecting all Microsoft based operating systems except Windows 2003. Both companies states that the vulnerability is currently being exploited by malicious websites. One attack vector is through Internet Explorer 6/7 — so be aware where you surf to."

Separate the cache from the browser?

[Kadin2048]

Actually, it might make sense to take the caching functions out of the web browser, maybe even out of client machines entirely, in favor of network appliances. That would allow you to have very secure, locked-down browsers, while still doing caching.

I've always been surprised that Linksys or one of the other network-box companies hasn't put together an easy to use "web accellerator" caching proxy. I suppose it's because it would be too hard to explain to a lot of people (the kind of people who don't grok the difference between a web browser and "the Internet" to begin with) and require setup on the client machines that would incur too many support questions.

But if you look at the setup of most people's home networks, you have a relatively slow backhaul, usually only a few megabits, with a very fast and barely utilized internal network (generally at least 10-11 Mb/s, often faster).

It would make a certain amount of sense to do all the caching in a single location, at the router, and then have all the clients pull from that. Then you could access the internet from lightweight devices that didn't have any onboard storage. Plus you could probably set up some way to save the browser state between devices (like Google Browser Sync), but without transmitting any information out of the house.

By separating out the functions that require write access to a file system from the browser, you could run the browser without any privileges, but still get caching. The cache device would just save files based on when and how frequently they were accessed, without looking at them, so it would also be secure. No process would be both executing instructions in the content, and have write access to a filesystem.