At the Hacker Halted conference in Atlanta, security researchers Xiaoran Wang and Angelo Prado demonstrated on Thursday some weaknesses in the major browsers in use today, including Chrome and Internet Explorer. The conference, which was organized by the EC-Council Foundation, included two days of presentations from dozens of security experts.
Wang and Prado's presentation featured demonstrations of a number of different tactics hackers could use to compromise victims. Perhaps the most problematic of the methods they discussed involved abusing the data URI scheme, which offers a way to include data in-line in webpages as if they were external resources. The data URI scheme allows normally separate elements to be fetched in a single HTTP request as opposed to multiple requests.
While this has its advantages, Wang told the audience that it could also be used to infect users.
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