XSS, Cross Site Scripting in video.msn.com/services/user/info, CWE-79, CAPEC-86, DORK, GHDB

Report generated by XSS.CX at Fri Mar 25 20:57:44 CDT 2011.

Public Domain Vulnerability Information, Security Articles, Vulnerability Reports, GHDB, DORK Search

1. Cross-site scripting (reflected)

2. Cookie scoped to parent domain

3. Cookie without HttpOnly flag set

4. Content type incorrectly stated

1. Cross-site scripting (reflected) next

Summary

Severity:	High
Confidence:	Certain
Host:	http://video.msn.com
Path:	/services/user/info

Issue detail

The value of the callback request parameter is copied into the HTML document as plain text between tags. The payload cdc70<script>alert(1)</script>5b6f3636a2f was submitted in the callback 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.

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 /services/user/info?callback=jsonp1301101466663cdc70<script>alert(1)</script>5b6f3636a2f&FORM=Z9LH6&responseEncoding=json HTTP/1.1
Host: video.msn.com
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.bing.com/entertainment?FORM=Z9LH6
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.151 Safari/534.16
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: MC1=V=3&GUID=1593e55bc6bd4a6fa24e1aa0798f062a; mh=MSFT; CC=US; CULTURE=EN-US; expid=id=6b1cac6514464382aeb0ec1c3a7c9515&bd=2011-03-22T21:01:56.366&v=2; Sample=86; SRCHHPGUSR=AS=1; MUID=FA3AE6176FAC4414AD6FC26C726B4B15

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Expires: -1
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
Machine: CH1********357
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Set-Cookie: zip=z:75207|la:32.7825|lo:-96.8207|ci:Dallas|c:US; domain=msn.com; expires=Sat, 02-Apr-2011 01:07:02 GMT; path=/
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2011 01:07:02 GMT
Content-Length: 226
Connection: keep-alive

jsonp1301101466663cdc70<script>alert(1)</script>5b6f3636a2f({"user":{"country":{"name":{"$":'US'},"flags":{"$":'40000000'},"zip":{"$":'75207'},"$":null},"market":{"name":{"$":'en-us'},"enabled":{"$":'True'},"$":null},"$":""}})

2. Cookie scoped to parent domain previous next

Summary

Severity:	Information
Confidence:	Certain
Host:	http://video.msn.com
Path:	/services/user/info

Issue detail

The following cookie was issued by the application and is scoped to a parent of the issuing domain:

zip=z:75207|la:32.7825|lo:-96.8207|ci:Dallas|c:US; domain=msn.com; expires=Sat, 02-Apr-2011 01:06:21 GMT; path=/

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 /services/user/info?callback=jsonp1301101466663&FORM=Z9LH6&responseEncoding=json HTTP/1.1
Host: video.msn.com
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.bing.com/entertainment?FORM=Z9LH6
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.151 Safari/534.16
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: MC1=V=3&GUID=1593e55bc6bd4a6fa24e1aa0798f062a; mh=MSFT; CC=US; CULTURE=EN-US; expid=id=6b1cac6514464382aeb0ec1c3a7c9515&bd=2011-03-22T21:01:56.366&v=2; Sample=86; SRCHHPGUSR=AS=1; MUID=FA3AE6176FAC4414AD6FC26C726B4B15

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Expires: -1
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
Machine: CH1********357
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Set-Cookie: zip=z:75207|la:32.7825|lo:-96.8207|ci:Dallas|c:US; domain=msn.com; expires=Sat, 02-Apr-2011 01:06:21 GMT; path=/
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2011 01:06:21 GMT
Content-Length: 185
Connection: keep-alive

jsonp1301101466663({"user":{"country":{"name":{"$":'US'},"flags":{"$":'40000000'},"zip":{"$":'75207'},"$":null},"market":{"name":{"$":'en-us'},"enabled":{"$":'True'},"$":null},"$":""}})

3. Cookie without HttpOnly flag set previous next

Summary

Severity:	Information
Confidence:	Certain
Host:	http://video.msn.com
Path:	/services/user/info

Issue detail

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

zip=z:75207|la:32.7825|lo:-96.8207|ci:Dallas|c:US; domain=msn.com; expires=Sat, 02-Apr-2011 01:06:21 GMT; path=/

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

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

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Expires: -1
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
Machine: CH1********357
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Set-Cookie: zip=z:75207|la:32.7825|lo:-96.8207|ci:Dallas|c:US; domain=msn.com; expires=Sat, 02-Apr-2011 01:06:21 GMT; path=/
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2011 01:06:21 GMT
Content-Length: 185
Connection: keep-alive

jsonp1301101466663({"user":{"country":{"name":{"$":'US'},"flags":{"$":'40000000'},"zip":{"$":'75207'},"$":null},"market":{"name":{"$":'en-us'},"enabled":{"$":'True'},"$":null},"$":""}})

4. Content type incorrectly stated previous

Summary

Severity:	Information
Confidence:	Firm
Host:	http://video.msn.com
Path:	/services/user/info

Issue detail

The response contains the following Content-type statement:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

The response states that it contains HTML. However, it actually appears to contain CSS.

Issue background

If a web response specifies an incorrect content type, then browsers may process the response in unexpected ways. If the specified content type is a renderable text-based format, then the browser will usually attempt to parse and render the response in that format. If the specified type is an image format, then the browser will usually detect the anomaly and will analyse the actual content and attempt to determine its MIME type. Either case can lead to unexpected results, and if the content contains any user-controllable data may lead to cross-site scripting or other client-side vulnerabilities.

In most cases, the presence of an incorrect content type statement 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 a message body, the application should include a single Content-type header which correctly and unambiguously states the MIME type of the content in the response body.

Request

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Expires: -1
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
Machine: CH1********357
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Set-Cookie: zip=z:75207|la:32.7825|lo:-96.8207|ci:Dallas|c:US; domain=msn.com; expires=Sat, 02-Apr-2011 01:06:21 GMT; path=/
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2011 01:06:21 GMT
Content-Length: 185
Connection: keep-alive

jsonp1301101466663({"user":{"country":{"name":{"$":'US'},"flags":{"$":'40000000'},"zip":{"$":'75207'},"$":null},"market":{"name":{"$":'en-us'},"enabled":{"$":'True'},"$":null},"$":""}})

Report generated by XSS.CX at Fri Mar 25 20:57:44 CDT 2011.