.com. filter bypass

        I know this is pretty trivial, but I haven't seen anyone write anything
about this.  I'm not sure how useful it really is as an attack vector, but:

"http://www.google.com./"; is a valid url in browsers (with the dot at the end).

        It seems like it might be used to circumvent some pattern matching
filters in use with CGIs.  Something like:

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";
$domain_query = $ENV{QUERY_STRING} # $domain_query is "www.google.com."
if ($domain_query !~ m/^www\.google\.com$/){
  #execute something you normally wouldn't allow for www.google.com
} else {
  print "Sorry!\n";
}

        Where the URL in this case actually is google.com when rendered.  I
tested this with IE on XP Pro and lynx on XP Pro cygwin and on FBSD.  As a side
note, nslookup and traceroute both ignored the trailing period, which actually
is okay behavior, but also makes them candidates if this sort of check is
performed before they are run with a system call....  Yup, as I said, pretty
trivial.

-R

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