[45603] in Cypherpunks
Re: (Fwd) SECURITY ALERT: Password protection bug in Netscape 2.0b
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jeff Weinstein)
Tue Dec 19 01:39:38 1995
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 1995 22:23:07 -0800
From: Jeff Weinstein <jsw@netscape.com>
To: trei@process.com
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
This report is mostly bogus. Netscape does not, and never
has stored http auth passwords in files on your disk. However
we do cache documents from servers that use http auth.
In this case the user had their preferences set to check the
host site for updated content "once per session". There is
a bug, which we are fixing before 2.0 ships, that if the
auth fails the document should be removed from the cache but
was not. If the user had set their cache checking to "never",
then if the document is in the cache, it will always be shown to
the user, since no connection is made to the server.
Content providers who don't want their web pages cached
should use the 'Pragma: no-cache' http header. This will
tell the navigator to not save the document in the disk cache.
--Jeff
--
Jeff Weinstein - Electronic Munitions Specialist
Netscape Communication Corporation
jsw@netscape.com - http://home.netscape.com/people/jsw
Any opinions expressed above are mine.
