frwebgate.access.gpo.gov, XSS, Cross Site Scripting, CWE-79, CAPEC-86

Cross Site Scripting in frwebgate.access.gpo.gov | Vulnerability Crawler Report

Report generated by XSS.CX at Thu Dec 30 19:26:52 CST 2010.

Contents

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1. Cross-site scripting (reflected)

2. Content type incorrectly stated


1. Cross-site scripting (reflected)  next

Summary

Severity:   High
Confidence:   Certain
Host:   http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov
Path:   /cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi

Issue detail

The name of an arbitrarily supplied request parameter is copied into the HTML document as plain text between tags. The payload 34fbf<script>alert(1)</script>72119254ed6 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.

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 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.

Request

GET /cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?34fbf<script>alert(1)</script>72119254ed6=1 HTTP/1.1
Host: frwebgate.access.gpo.gov
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: Thu, 30 Dec 2010 06:42:46 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 11294

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html><!-- InstanceBegin template="/Templates/secondarypage.dwt" codeOutsideHTMLIsLocke
...[SNIP]...
<H1>Invalid variable in query string [34fbf<script>alert(1)</script>72119254ed6=]<PRE>
...[SNIP]...
2. Content type incorrectly stated  previous

Summary

Severity:   Information
Confidence:   Firm
Host:   http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov
Path:   /favicon.ico

Issue detail

The response contains the following Content-type statement:The response states that it contains plain text. However, it actually appears to contain unrecognised content.

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

GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1
Host: frwebgate.access.gpo.gov
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Accept: */*
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/8.0.552.224 Safari/534.10
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: Thu, 30 Dec 2010 06:53:08 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
Last-Modified: Tue, 11 Mar 2008 17:35:25 GMT
ETag: "10e806a-57e-4482cbee0b140"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 1406
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

..............h.......(....... ............................................60..    ...............................................................................0;...........!..ix.................x.....
...[SNIP]...
Report generated by XSS.CX at Thu Dec 30 19:26:52 CST 2010.