Re: Gnus vulnerable to virus?

[Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc>]

On Mon, Dec 12 2005, David Abrahams wrote:

> I have always thought, smugly, that by using Gnus I was insulating
> myself from viruses.  However, when I looked at the enclosed email
> under NTEmacs, I got a dialog box saying that no known program could
> open mm.304-VK (actually, the characters after "mm." vary each time I
> look at the email).

Your "possible-virus" has the following MIME structure:

  <* alternative> Re: tangle chairmanship
  <1.* alternative>
  <1.1 text>
  <1.2 html>
  <2 gif>

In the default config, Gnus will automatically display the GIF image.
See the recent thread on "spam mails using image/gif in
multipart/alternative":
<news:v94q5j5m1q.fsf@marauder.physik.uni-ulm.de>
http://thread.gmane.org/v94q5j5m1q.fsf%40marauder.physik.uni-ulm.de

> This seems like it's a few bytes away from being able to run
> arbitrary programs.

Only if you have stupidly configured Gnus to pass MIME types to the
default windows application, e.g. by opening MIME a type with "open".

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
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