XSS, DORK, Style Attribute, CWE-79, CAPEC-86, www.favlog.de

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

Report generated by XSS.CX at Sun Apr 17 09:45:42 CDT 2011.

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

1. Cross-site scripting (reflected) next

Summary

Severity:	High
Confidence:	Certain
Host:	http://www.favlog.de
Path:	/submit.php

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 4b394"%20style%3dx%3aexpression(alert(1))%203927ed65879 was submitted in the REST URL parameter 1. This input was echoed as 4b394\" style=x:expression(alert(1)) 3927ed65879 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 PoC attack demonstrated uses a dynamically evaluated expression with a style attribute to introduce arbirary JavaScript into the document. Note that this technique is specific to Internet Explorer, and may not work on other browsers.

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 /submit.php4b394"%20style%3dx%3aexpression(alert(1))%203927ed65879 HTTP/1.1
Host: www.favlog.de
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 14:15:17 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.8k mod_jk/1.2.26 PHP/5.2.9 mod_apreq2-20051231/2.6.0 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.0
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.9
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=9ccdeh3nqm7lod25rvsqul5or5; path=/
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 18450

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html dir="ltr" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
...[SNIP]...
<a href="/upcoming/submit.php4b394\" style=x:expression(alert(1)) 3927ed65879">
...[SNIP]...

2. Cookie without HttpOnly flag set previous

Summary

Severity:	Low
Confidence:	Firm
Host:	http://www.favlog.de
Path:	/submit.php

Issue detail

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

PHPSESSID=1krk4g9csih8cal8a5k7nf4nd3; 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.

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 /submit.php HTTP/1.1
Host: www.favlog.de
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)
Connection: close

Response

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2011 14:14:48 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.8k mod_jk/1.2.26 PHP/5.2.9 mod_apreq2-20051231/2.6.0 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.0
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.9
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=1krk4g9csih8cal8a5k7nf4nd3; path=/
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Location: /login.php?return=/submit.php
Content-Length: 0
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Report generated by XSS.CX at Sun Apr 17 09:45:42 CDT 2011.