Items tagged javascript, xss
Filters: javascript × xss × Sorted by date
Why are XSS attacks spreading like fire these days?
XSS attacks are common and easy, and crop up all the time. What’s new is that the number of people who are aware of the potential for XSS worms has increased hugely, so when an XSS does crop up in something popular there’s a much higher chance of someone turning it in to a worm (as happened with Twitter the other day).
[... 96 words]Busting frame busting: a study of clickjacking vulnerabilities at popular sites (via) Fascinating and highly readable security paper from the Stanford Web Security Research group. Clickjacking can be mitigated using framebusting techniques, but it turns out that almost all of those techniques can be broken in various ways. Fun examples include double-nesting iframes so that the framebusting script overwrites the top-level frame rather than the whole window, and a devious attack against the IE and Chrome XSS filters which tricks them in to deleting the framebusting JavaScript by reflecting portions of it in the framed page’s URL. The authors suggest a new framebusting snippet that should be more effective, but sadly it relies on blanking out the whole page in CSS and making it visible again in JavaScript, making it inaccessible to browsers with JavaScript disabled. # 24th May 2010, 11:40 am
When Ajax Attacks! Web application security fundamentals. Slides and notes from my talk on web application security at @media Ajax last Tuesday. # 20th September 2008, 4:16 pm
When Ajax Attacks! Web application security fundamentals. Slides and (other people’s) notes from my presentation at @media Ajax on Tuesday. # 17th September 2008, 11:18 pm
Coding Horror: Protecting Your Cookies: HttpOnly. Jeff Atwood discovers the hard way that writing an HTML sanitizer is significantly harder than you would think. HttpOnly cookies aren’t the solution though: they’re potentially useful as part of a defense in depth strategy, but fundamentally if you have an XSS hole you’re going to get 0wned, HttpOnly cookies or not. Auto-escape everything on output and be extremely cautious with things like HTML sanitizers. # 29th August 2008, 2:01 am
quipt (via) Extremely clever idea: Cache JavaScript in window.name (which persists between page views and can hold several MB of data), but use document.referrer to check that an external domain hasn’t loaded the cache with malicious code for an XSS attack. UPDATE: Jesse Ruderman points out a fatal flaw in the comments. # 4th July 2008, 3:49 pm
BUG: XSS Security flaw in BaseCamp Messages (via) BaseCamp lets users include HTML and JavaScript in messages, on the basis that anyone with a BaseCamp account is a trusted party. I’m not convinced: you could use this to circumvent BaseCamp’s access control stuff and read messages you’re not meant to. On the flip side, you could also use this to add brand new features to BaseCamp by using JavaScript in a message as a server-side equivalent to Greasemonkey. # 26th June 2008, 9:39 am
Crossdomain.xml Invites Cross-site Mayhem. A useful reminder that crossdomain.xml files should be treated with extreme caution. Allowing access from * makes it impossible to protect your site against CSRF attacks, and even allowing from a “circle of trust” of domains can be fatal if just one of those domains has an XSS hole. # 15th May 2008, 8:06 am
Dangers of remote Javascript. Perl.com got hit by a JavaScript porn redirect when the domain of one of their advertisers expired and was bought by a porn company. Nat Torkington suggests keeping track of the expiration dates on any third party domains that are serving JavaScript on your site. # 20th January 2008, 9:49 am
Site-specific browsers and GreaseKit. New site-specific browser tool which lets you include a bunch of Greasemonkey scripts. For me, the killer feature of site-specific browsers is still cookie isolation (to minimise the impact of XSS and CSRF holes) but none of the current batch of tools advertise this as a feature, and most seem to want to share the system-wide cookie jar. # 25th October 2007, 7:56 am
MySpace: Too Much of a Good Thing? CSS customization really was just the result of forgetting to strip HTML. They “eventually” decided to filter out JavaScript(!) # 17th January 2007, 9:09 am
The Register hit by XSS
Here’s a nasty one: popular tech news site The Register was hit on Saturday by the Bofra exploit, a nasty worm which uses an iframe vulnerability in (you guessed it) Internet Explorer to install nasty things on the victim’s PC. Where it gets interesting is that the attack wasn’t against the Register themselves; it came through their third party ad serving company, Falk AG.
[... 262 words]