Bugtraq: Re: blocking gzip encoded files

[mgotts () 2roads com]

Darwin Mecham <darwin () cissp com> wrote on 02/23/2004 02:38:39 PM:

> It has recently come to my attention that most browsers happily
> do Accept-encoding: gzip and streaming decompression of
> HTML data received with Content-encoding: gzip
>  without asking.
>
> This has been in use since sometime in 1998.
>
> Is there a way to configure the run-of-the-mill browser to
> block these at the host level ?
I don't know of a browser setting to enable/disable it. But you can use 
something like Proxomitron to do it (http://www.proxomitron.info/). The 
gzip setting is one of the "Headers" settings and is called "
Accept-encoding: Allow webpage encoding (out)". Disable this to prevent 
gzip encoding from being used. I've done so in the past, and it does 
indeed work as advertised.

Proxomitron does *MUCH* more than this, if you are not yet familiar with 
it.

-- Mark