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Content sniffing, also known as media type sniffing or MIME sniffing, is the practice of inspecting the content of a byte stream to attempt to deduce the file format of the data within it. Content sniffing is generally used to compensate for a lack of accurate metadata that would otherwise be required to enable the file to be interpreted correctly. Content sniffing techniques tend to use a mixture of techniques that rely on the redundancy found in most file formats: looking for file signatures and magic numbers, and heuristics including searching for well-known representative substrings, the use of byte frequency and n-gram tables, and Bayesian inference.
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) sniffing was, and still is, used by some web browsers, including notably Microsoft's Internet Explorer, in an attempt to help web sites which do not correctly signal the MIME type of web content display.[1] However, doing this opens up a serious security vulnerability,[2] in which, by confusing the MIME sniffing algorithm, the browser can be manipulated into interpreting data in a way that allows an attacker to carry out operations that are not expected by either the site operator or user, such as cross-site scripting.[3] Moreover, by making sites which do not correctly assign MIME types to content appear to work correctly in those browsers, it fails to encourage the correct labeling of material, which in turn makes content sniffing necessary for these sites to work, creating a vicious circle of incompatibility with web standards and security best practices.
A specification exists for media type sniffing in HTML5, which attempts to balance the requirements of security with the need for reverse compatibility with web content with missing or incorrect MIME-type data. It attempts to provide a precise specification that can be used across implementations to implement a single well-defined and deterministic set of behaviors.[4]
The UNIX file command can be viewed as a content sniffing application.
^"MIME Type Detection in Windows Internet Explorer". Microsoft. Retrieved 2012-07-14.
^Barth, Adam. "Secure Content Sniffing for Web Browsers, or How to Stop Papers from Reviewing Themselves" (PDF).
^Henry Sudhof (11 February 2009). "Risky sniffing: MIME sniffing in Internet Explorer enables cross-site scripting attacks". The H. Retrieved 2012-07-14.
^Adam Barth, Ian Hickson. "Mime Sniffing". WHATWG. Retrieved 2012-07-14.
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