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Detecting "Content-Type: multipart/related;" for virus protection

2001-11-30 15:37:02
A couple of days ago, someone suggested using the "^MIME-Version:"
fields, like "^Content-Type: multipart/related;", for detecting
potentially malicious Microsoft Outlook attachments, (which would be
significantly faster than searching the body of messages for a "name="
string.)

Unfortunately, there is a problem with the way Microsoft Outlook
parses e-mail headers. For example, in BadTrans.B:

    MIME-Version: 1.0
    Content-Type: multipart/related;
    type="multipart/alternative";
    boundary="====_ABC1234567890DEF_===="

which is a violation of RFC822, paragraph 3.1.1, (there is no linear
whitespace preceding the "type" and "boundary" records.)  Microsoft
Outlook, incorrectly, parses the body of such a message as a MIME
message, (metamail(1), correctly, does not.)

        John

BTW, NAI WebShield SMTP for NT parses the BadTrans.B headers,
correctly, and determines that the message is not a MIME message,
allowing it, incorrectly, to pass.

-- 

John Conover, conover(_at_)rahul(_dot_)net, http://www.johncon.com/

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