XSS, Reflected Cross Site Scripting, CWE-79, CAPEC-86, DORK, GHDB, symform.com

The value of REST URL parameter 1 is copied into the HTML document as plain text between tags. The payload 74426<script>alert(1)</script>491664cd093 was submitted in the REST URL parameter 1. 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.

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.

Issue remediation

In most situations where user-controllable data is copied into application responses, cross-site scripting attacks can be prevented using two layers of defences:

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.

Request

GET /error.aspx74426<script>alert(1)</script>491664cd093?aspxerrorpath=/js/jquery.easing.1.2.js HTTP/1.1
Host: www.symform.com
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.symform.com/
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/11.0.696.77 Safari/534.24
Accept: */*
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: ASP.NET_SessionId=D7202254508E2D8270E26620

Response

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2011 01:46:29 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) mod_mono/2.6.3 mod_ssl/2.2.9 OpenSSL/0.9.8g
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Content-Length: 1776
Connection: keep-alive

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"
...[SNIP]...
</strong>/error.aspx74426<script>alert(1)</script>491664cd093</p>
...[SNIP]...

2. Cookie without HttpOnly flag set previous next
There are 2 instances of this issue:

/
/error.aspx

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.

2.1. http://www.symform.com/ next

Summary

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

Issue detail

The following cookie was issued by the application and does not have the HttpOnly flag set:

ASP.NET_SessionId=8B30656D5DA2BB84D30109F4; path=/

The cookie appears to contain a session token, which may increase the risk associated with this issue. You should review the contents of the cookie to determine its function.

Request

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.symform.com
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/11.0.696.77 Safari/534.24
Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
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
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2011 01:46:21 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) mod_mono/2.6.3 mod_ssl/2.2.9 OpenSSL/0.9.8g
Set-Cookie: ASP.NET_SessionId=8B30656D5DA2BB84D30109F4; path=/
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Content-Length: 21365
Connection: keep-alive

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-T
...[SNIP]...

2.2. http://www.symform.com/error.aspx previous next

Summary

Severity:	Low
Confidence:	Firm
Host:	http://www.symform.com
Path:	/error.aspx

Issue detail

The following cookie was issued by the application and does not have the HttpOnly flag set:

ASP.NET_SessionId=AF55E4709865E4B81B9A9535; path=/

The cookie appears to contain a session token, which may increase the risk associated with this issue. You should review the contents of the cookie to determine its function.

Request

GET /error.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/js/jquery.easing.1.2.js HTTP/1.1
Host: www.symform.com
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.symform.com/
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/11.0.696.77 Safari/534.24
Accept: */*
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: ASP.NET_SessionId=D7202254508E2D8270E26620

Response

3. Cross-domain Referer leakage previous next

Summary

Severity:	Information
Confidence:	Certain
Host:	http://www.symform.com
Path:	/error.aspx

Issue detail

The page was loaded from a URL containing a query string:

http://www.symform.com/error.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/js/jquery.easing.1.2.js

The response contains the following links to other domains:

http://www.facebook.com/Symform
http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=ABQIAAAA8wkjp86aA2lY59Oyae1r9RSTWSh3uuriamAqW7xAwoA3MNUPXBRr3h5kXrhLDs4sA6c4c5pirroWDg
http://www.linkedin.com/companies/symform
http://www.twitter.com/symform
http://www.youtube.com/symform

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

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2011 01:46:27 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) mod_mono/2.6.3 mod_ssl/2.2.9 OpenSSL/0.9.8g
Set-Cookie: ASP.NET_SessionId=AF55E4709865E4B81B9A9535; path=/
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Content-Length: 16742
Connection: keep-alive

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-T
...[SNIP]...
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=ABQIAAAA8wkjp86aA2lY59Oyae1r9RSTWSh3uuriamAqW7xAwoA3MNUPXBRr3h5kXrhLDs4sA6c4c5pirroWDg"></script>
...[SNIP]...
<div id="social-network">
       <a href="http://www.facebook.com/Symform"><img src="images/btn-facebook.gif" width="30" height="32" alt="Find Us on Facebook" /></a>
       <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/companies/symform"><img src="images/btn-linkedin.gif" width="30" height="32" alt="Connect with Us on LinkedIn" /></a>
       <a href="http://www.twitter.com/symform"><img src="images/btn-twitter.gif" width="30" height="32" alt="Follow Us on Twitter" /></a>
       <a href="http://www.youtube.com/symform"><img src="images/btn-youtube.gif" width="30" height="32" alt="Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel" />
...[SNIP]...

4. Cross-domain script include previous next
There are 2 instances of this issue:

/
/error.aspx

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.

4.1. http://www.symform.com/ previous next

Summary

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

Issue detail

The response dynamically includes the following script from another domain:

http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=ABQIAAAA8wkjp86aA2lY59Oyae1r9RSTWSh3uuriamAqW7xAwoA3MNUPXBRr3h5kXrhLDs4sA6c4c5pirroWDg

Request

Response

4.2. http://www.symform.com/error.aspx previous next

Summary

Severity:	Information
Confidence:	Certain
Host:	http://www.symform.com
Path:	/error.aspx

Issue detail

The response dynamically includes the following script from another domain:

http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=ABQIAAAA8wkjp86aA2lY59Oyae1r9RSTWSh3uuriamAqW7xAwoA3MNUPXBRr3h5kXrhLDs4sA6c4c5pirroWDg

Request

Response

5. TRACE method is enabled previous next

Summary

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

Issue description

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.

Request

TRACE / HTTP/1.0
Host: www.symform.com
Cookie: 3610bc0d066172b4

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: message/http
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2011 01:46:22 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) mod_mono/2.6.3 mod_ssl/2.2.9 OpenSSL/0.9.8g
Content-Length: 218
Connection: Close

TRACE / HTTP/1.1
host: www.symform.com
Cookie: 3610bc0d066172b4; ASP.NET_SessionId=D7202254508E2D8270E26620
X-Forwarded-For: 173.193.214.243
X-Forwarded-Port: 80
X-Forwarded-Proto: http
Connection: keep-alive

6. Email addresses disclosed previous next
There are 2 instances of this issue:

/
/error.aspx

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).

6.1. http://www.symform.com/ previous next

Summary

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

Issue detail

The following email address was disclosed in the response:

info@symform.com

Request

Response

6.2. http://www.symform.com/error.aspx previous

Summary

Severity:	Information
Confidence:	Certain
Host:	http://www.symform.com
Path:	/error.aspx

Issue detail

The following email address was disclosed in the response:

info@symform.com

Request

Response

7. Robots.txt file previous

Summary

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

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.symform.com

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2011 01:46:22 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 22 Jun 2011 19:15:14 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) mod_mono/2.6.3 mod_ssl/2.2.9 OpenSSL/0.9.8g
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Content-Length: 122
Connection: Close

User-agent: *
Disallow: /www-test
Disallow: /docs
Disallow: /jscript
Disallow: /includes
Disallow: /ftp
Allow: /

Report generated by XSS.CX at Fri Jun 24 05:27:00 CDT 2011.