Opinion: The misguided advisory from Heise Security sets unrealistic expectations for a new Windows security feature and then criticizes Microsoft for not meeting them.
When I first saw the advisory "Flaws in SP2 security features," written by Jürgen Schmidt of Heise Security, I just laughed and blew it off as a big nothing. Now, I agree that it illustrates limitations in one of the new security features of Windows XP Service Pack 2. But a flaw? That's a hard claim to make.
The basic claim of the advisory is that the new file-attachment security features of SP2 have a hole that allows attachments from untrusted sources to be executed in spite of protections Windows claims to provide. What are these protections?
According to Microsoft's description of these new capabilities, "Application developers will be able to call the new AES [Attachment Execution Service] dialog box from their Windows applications." It appears that CMD.EXE doesn't do this. This is what Heise's Schmidt found.
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