4 ms·

They do not use your system's address book to fill forms online.

• macrael 16y ago
  Doesn't firefox autofill forms? I didn't realize that was a safari only feature.
  • cschep 16y ago
    Firefox fills forms out with data you've supplied by hand already I think.
  • pyre 16y ago
    Quoting the parent (emphasis mine): They do not use your system's address book to fill forms online.
  • natmaster 16y ago
    Autocomplete by other browsers works by remembering things you entered in forms previously (maybe restricted to domain?). One distinction is that you already decided you wanted to expose that information. The most important distinction though, is that you have to still select to fill that out manually. Of course logins are another story - those are automatically filled in. But those are restricted to the page you already entered them on, and you have to decide you want that information filled explicitly.
    • loewenskind 16y ago
      Couldn't you still use a variation of this hack to steal the info from Firefox? Steps: 1. Go to a popular site that makes one fill out the information you want to steal. 2. Record the name they use for all their fields (afaik this is how FF determines what value to supply) 3. Use the hack to make a form with those fields 4. Profit On step 3, it may be that you have to enter the field and type something to get the auto-complete to kick in, but that's easy: you only need to try 26 letters and 10 numbers to get a hit.
      • confuzatron 16y ago
        If you're right, the test page should work in FF. You could try it. Step 1 and 2 aren't required - the field names are 'standard'. Step 3 is what the test page does already. Edit: It looks like the javascript used to generate keypresses isn't supported by Firefox: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/document.createEvent https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/document.createEvent var event = document.createEvent('TextEvent'); event.initTextEvent('textInput', true, true, null, char); input.value = ""; input.selectionStart = 0; input.selectionEnd = 0; input.focus(); input.dispatchEvent(event);
      • mseebach 16y ago
        Step 3.5: Get the user to activate auto-complete (start typing, or just arrow-down) and select an item from the list on each field.
      • natmaster 16y ago
        Autocomplete is activated by user interaction, not javascript events. The only way to trigger this would be a phishing attack, where you tricked the user into entering their information in.... but in that case, you're not really benefiting from autocomplete because they would have given it to you anyway.
        • InclinedPlane 16y ago
          Yup. Also worth noting is that this is a proof of concept, a real attack would likely use non visible form fields and background automatic data transmission. I think most people would agree that there's a world of difference between a phishing attack and an automated drive by attack.
• maxjg 16y ago
  Understand that it's fetching the data from the system's address book, but obviously this is going to be the same data it would remember if you entered it elsewhere. Keep in mind that this is a feature of Safari being exploited, it's not like this is an vulnerability in the address book gives you unlimited access to all the user's contacts.
• jey 16y ago
  Er, the problem seems to be more that Javascript-initiated keyboard events can trigger AutoComplete. Only KB events from the system should be allowed to do that.