Remote CGI can crash Netscape 4.x

Netscape 4.x will crash when given a content-type of "internal/parser".
Earlier versions seem unaffected. Tested versions are 4.05 and 4.5b1.
Under Win95 it simply hangs and needs a three finger salute to kill it.
It dies with a bus fault under Linux. To test it, try
http://www.jtan.com/~jim/netscape-crash.cgi , which contains

#!/bin/sh
echo Content-type: internal/parser
echo
echo If you can see this, your browser is OK!

It may be possible to do worse than crash a browser. If this data is
going to the same place that parsed pages go, I would imagine that
buffer overflows are present.

I submitted a bug report to Netscape.

-jim
Received on Oct 08 1998