IP page 10 - Dave's Blog

By the URI RFC there is only one way to represent a particular IPv4 address in the host of a URI. This is the standard dotted decimal notation of four bytes in decimal with no leading zeroes delimited by periods. And no leading zeros are allowed which means there's only one textual representation of a particular IPv4 address.

However as discussed in the URI RFC, there are other forms of IPv4 addresses that although not officially allowed are generally accepted. Many implementations used inet_aton to parse the address from the URI which accepts more than just dotted decimal. Instead of dotted decimal, each dot delimited part can be in decimal, octal (if preceded by a '0') or hex (if preceded by '0x' or '0X'). And that's each section individually - they don't have to match. And there need not be 4 parts: there can be between 1 and 4 (inclusive). In case of less than 4, the last part in the string represents all of the left over bytes, not just one.

For example the following are all equivalent:

192.168.1.1

Standard dotted decimal form

0300.0250.01.01

Octal

0xC0.0XA8.0x1.0X1

Hex

192.168.257

Fewer parts

0300.0XA8.257

All of the above

The bread and butter of URI related security issues is when one part of the system disagrees with another about the interpretation of the URI. So this non-standard, non-normal form syntax has been been a great source of security issues in the past. Its mostly well known now (CreateUri normalizes these non-normal forms to dotted decimal), but occasionally a good tool for bypassing naive URI blocking systems.

The goal of this experiment was to combine the flipping tables emoticons with the Threw It On The Ground video using shiny new HTML5-ish features and the end result is the table flipper flipping the Threw It On the Ground video.

The table flipper emoticon is CSS before content that changes on hover. Additionally on hover a CSS transform is applied to flip the video upside down several times and move it to the right and there's a CSS transition to animate the flipping. The only issue I ran into is that (at least on Windows) Flash doesn't like to have CSS transform rotations applied to it. So to get the most out of the flip experiment you must opt-in to HTML5 video on YouTube. And of course you must use a browser that supports the various things I just mentioned, like the latest Chrome (or not yet released IE10).

One of the more limiting issues of writing client side script in the browser is the same origin limitations of XMLHttpRequest. The latest version of all browsers support a subset of CORS to allow servers to opt-in particular resources for cross-domain access. Since IE8 there's XDomainRequest and in all other browsers (including IE10) there's XHR L2's cross-origin request features. But the vast majority of resources out on the web do not opt-in using CORS headers and so client side only web apps like a podcast player or a feed reader aren't doable.

One hack-y way around this I've found is to use YQL as a CORS proxy. YQL applies the CORS header to all its responses and among its features it allows a caller to request an arbitrary XML, HTML, or JSON resource. So my network helper script first attempts to access a URI directly using XDomainRequest if that exists and XMLHttpRequest otherwise. If that fails it then tries to use XDR or XHR to access the URI via YQL. I wrap my URIs in the following manner, where type is either "html", "xml", or "json":

        yqlRequest = function(uri, method, type, onComplete, onError) {
            var yqlUri = "http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=" + 
                encodeURIComponent("SELECT * FROM " + type + ' where url="' + encodeURIComponent(uri) + '"');

            if (type == "html") {
                yqlUri += encodeURIComponent(" and xpath='/*'");
            }
            else if (type == "json") {
                yqlUri += "&callback=&format=json";
            }
            ...

This also means I can get JSON data itself without having to go through JSONP.