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    The Spanner
    Web security blog

    Made by Gareth Heyes
    Follow me on Twitter: @garethheyes

    Javascript for hackers!

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    Late meta Christmas present

    By Gareth Heyes (@hackvertor)

    Published 15 years 8 months ago • Last updated March 22, 2025 • ⏱️ < 1 min read

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    Something like two years ago I think, I discovered IE had a additional HTML attribute called "CHARSET" quite convenient as it's defined in HTML5. This enabled me to bypass a few things using UTF-7. The MSDN documentation was updated to account for this hidden attribute which is pretty cool, so I found something hidden which actually was pretty useful and saved development time because it was already there! See Devs sometimes we are useful :) As usual I discovered it by manual testing and checking mshtml.dll in IDA Pro (demo cause I'm cheap), it looks like this:-

    
    <meta charset="utf-7" />
    
    

    Anyway there is your late crappy xmas present sorry it was late.

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