dom based cross site scripting prevention dom based cross site scripting prevention

That said, you should also analyze the CSP violations, as these trigger when the non-conforming code is executed. This enables attackers to execute malicious JavaScript, which typically allows them to hijack other users' accounts. JavaScript Contexts refer to placing variables into inline JavaScript which is then embedded in an HTML document. After encoding the encodedValue variable will contain %22Quoted%20Value%20with%20spaces%20and%20%26%22. This cheatsheet addresses DOM (Document Object Model) based XSS and is an extension (and assumes comprehension of) the XSS Prevention Cheatsheet. There are also TrustedScript and TrustedScriptURL objects for other sensitive sinks. The innerHTML sink doesn't accept script elements on any modern browser, nor will svg onload events fire. Websites may also store data on the server and reflect it elsewhere. Identifying and exploiting DOM XSS in the wild can be a tedious process, often requiring you to manually trawl through complex, minified JavaScript. //any code passed into lName is now executable. DOM based XSS is extremely difficult to mitigate against because of its large attack surface and lack of standardization across browsers. Testing JavaScript execution sinks for DOM-based XSS is a little harder. In Chrome's developer tools, you can use Control+F (or Command+F on MacOS) to search the DOM for your string. XSS is serious and can lead to account impersonation, observing user behaviour, loading external content, stealing sensitive data, and more. An XSS attack can be used to steal sensitive information, perform unauthorized actions on behalf of the user, or even take control of the user's session. There will be times where you need to do something outside the protection provided by your framework. JavaScript encoding takes dangerous characters for JavaScript and replaces them with their hex, for example < would be encoded as \u003C. In order to mitigate against the CSS url() method, ensure that you are URL encoding the data passed to the CSS url() method. Use one of the following approaches to prevent code from being exposed to DOM-based XSS: createElement () and assign property values with appropriate methods or properties such as node.textContent= or node.InnerText=. Output encoding here will prevent XSS, but it will break the intended functionality of the application. A DOM-based XSS attack is possible if the web application writes data to the DOM without proper sanitization. JavaScript encoding all untrusted input, as shown in these examples: Enclosed within a closure or JavaScript encoded to N-levels based on usage. An attacker can construct a link to send a victim to a vulnerable page with a payload in the query string and fragment portions of the URL. The doubleJavaScriptEncodedData has its first layer of JavaScript encoding reversed (upon execution) in the single quotes. The #redir route is executed by another file, redir.html. It is particularly common when applications leverage common JavaScript function calls such as document.baseURI to build a part of the page without sanitization. DOM-based XSS vulnerabilities usually arise when JavaScript takes data from an attacker-controllable source, such as the URL, and passes it to a sink that supports dynamic code execution, such as eval() or innerHTML. The enterprise-enabled dynamic web vulnerability scanner. If you have to use user input on your page, always use it in the text context, never as HTML tags or any other potential code. A list of output encoding libraries is included in the appendix. Ensure JavaScript variables are quoted, JavaScript Hex Encoding, JavaScript Unicode Encoding, Avoid backslash encoding (. Please note, element.setAttribute is only safe for a limited number of attributes. A DOM-based XSS attack> is possible if the web application writes data to the Document Object Model without proper sanitization. Many security training curriculums and papers advocate the blind usage of HTML encoding to resolve XSS. When you are in a DOM execution context you only need to JavaScript encode HTML attributes which do not execute code (attributes other than event handler, CSS, and URL attributes). document.createElement(""), element.setAttribute("","value"), element.appendChild() and similar are safe ways to build dynamic interfaces. Some XSS vulnerabilities are caused by the server-side code that insecurely creates the HTML code forming the website. All the Acunetix developers come with years of experience in the web security sphere. DOM-based XSS Examples. Please look at the OWASP Java Encoder JavaScript encoding examples for examples of proper JavaScript use that requires minimal encoding. The following article describes how to exploit different kinds of XSS Vulnerabilities that this article was created to help you avoid: Discussion on the Types of XSS Vulnerabilities: How to Review Code for Cross-site scripting Vulnerabilities: How to Test for Cross-site scripting Vulnerabilities: Copyright 2021 - CheatSheets Series Team - This work is licensed under a, Output Encoding for HTML Attribute Contexts, Output Encoding for JavaScript Contexts, Insecure Direct Object Reference Prevention, OWASP Java Encoder JavaScript encoding examples, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. This is commonly seen in programs that heavily use custom JavaScript embedded in their web pages. CSS is surprisingly powerful and has been used for many types of attacks. The best way to fix DOM based cross-site scripting is to use the right output method (sink). One of the simplest ways of doing this is to deliver your exploit via an iframe: In this example, the src attribute points to the vulnerable page with an empty hash value. If you pollute a river, it'll flow downstream somewhere. These methods constitute the HTML Subcontext within the Execution Context. The payload can be manipulated to deface the target application using a prompt that states: Your session has expired. Want to track your progress and have a more personalized learning experience? Since then, it has extended to include injection of basically any content, but we still refer to this as XSS. DOM XSS in jQuery selector sink using a hashchange event, DOM XSS in AngularJS expression with angle brackets and double quotes HTML-encoded. These locations are known as dangerous contexts. For more information on other types of XSS attacks: reflected XSS and stored XSS, see the following article: Types of XSS: Stored XSS, Reflected XSS, and DOM-based XSS. To prevent DOM-based cross-site scripting, sanitize all untrusted data, even if it is only used in client-side scripts. The DOM, or Document Object Model, is the structural format used to . It is important to use an encoding library that understands which characters can be used to exploit vulnerabilities in their respective contexts. Encoding at the point of output allows you to change the use of data, for example, from HTML to a query string value. To prevent server-side XSS, don't generate HTML by concatenating strings and use safe contextual-autoescaping templating libraries instead. Your application can be vulnerable to both reflected/stored XSS and DOM XSS. It uses the Document Object Model (DOM), which is a standard way to represent HTML objects in a hierarchical manner. This document only discusses JavaScript bugs which lead to XSS. In a few clicks we can analyze your entire application and see what components are vulnerable in your application, and suggest you quick fixes. How to detect DOM-based cross-site scripting? In an XSS attack, an attacker uses web-pages or web applications to send malicious code and compromise users' interactions with a vulnerable application. If A is double JavaScript encoded then the following if check will return false. This is a Safe Sink and will automatically URL encode data in it. In order to add a variable to a HTML context safely, use HTML entity encoding for that variable as you add it to a web template. ESAPI is one of the few which works on an allow list and encodes all non-alphanumeric characters. Validate all data that flows into your application from the server or a third-party API. Reflected and Stored XSS are server side injection issues while DOM based XSS is a client (browser) side injection issue. Read about other types of cross-site scripting attacks. DOM-based Cross-site Scripting (DOM XSS) is a particular type of a Cross-site Scripting vulnerability. \u0061\u006c\u0065\u0072\u0074\u0028\u0037\u0037\u0029. See what Acunetix Premium can do for you. Use a nonce-based Content Security Policy for additional mitigation against the bugs as they inevitably happen. Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a web security issue that sees cyber criminals execute malicious scripts on legitimate or trusted websites. This means, that no data will be available in server logs. Validation can be a useful tool in limiting XSS attacks. This cheat sheet provides guidance to prevent XSS vulnerabilities. This logically seems to be prudent advice as the JavaScript parser does not understand HTML encoding. Spaces, quotes, punctuation and other unsafe characters will be percent encoded to their hexadecimal value, for example a space character will become %20. XSS is one of the most common and dangerous web vulnerabilities, and it is . Strict structural validation (rule #4), CSS Hex encoding, Good design of CSS Features. HTML Attribute Contexts refer to placing a variable in an HTML attribute value. It simplifies security reviews, and allows you to enforce the type-based security checks done when compiling, linting, or bundling your code at runtime, in the browser. The guidelines below are an attempt to provide guidelines for developers when developing Web based JavaScript applications (Web 2.0) such that they can avoid XSS. The OWASP Cheat Sheet Series was created to provide a concise collection of high value information on specific application security topics. The innerText feature was originally introduced by Internet Explorer, and was formally specified in the HTML standard in 2016 after being adopted by all major browser vendors. The most common one would be adding it to an href or src attribute of an tag. Trusted Types force you to process a value. When other users load affected pages the attacker's scripts will run, enabling the attacker to steal cookies and session tokens, change the contents of the web page through DOM manipulation or redirect the browser to another page. DOM-based attack Reflected XSS Attacks The simplest type of XSS attack is where the application immediately processes and returns unsanitized user input in a search result, error message, or other HTTP responses. This is commonly associated with normal XSS, but it can also lead to reflected DOM XSS vulnerabilities. It is the process of converting untrusted . Policies are factories for Trusted Types that enforce certain security rules on their input: This code creates a policy called myEscapePolicy that can produce TrustedHTML objects via its createHTML() function. Use URL Encoding for these scenarios. If a JavaScript library such as jQuery is being used, look out for sinks that can alter DOM elements on the page. The HTML encoded value above is still executable. The purpose of output encoding (as it relates to Cross Site Scripting) is to convert untrusted input into a safe form where the input is displayed as data to the user without executing as code in the browser. With these sinks, your input doesn't necessarily appear anywhere within the DOM, so you can't search for it. We want to hear from you! A script on the page then processes the reflected data in an unsafe way, ultimately writing it to a dangerous sink. If your code looked like the following, you would need to only double JavaScript encode input data. Depending on the user input, use a suitable escaping technique like HTML escape, CSS escape, JavaScript escape, URL escape, etc. The majority of DOM XSS vulnerabilities can be found quickly and reliably using Burp Suite's web vulnerability scanner. Output Encoding and HTML Sanitization help address those gaps. DOM-based XSS simply means a cross-site scripting vulnerability that occurs in the DOM ( Document Object Model) of your site rather than in HTML. jQuery used to be extremely popular, and a classic DOM XSS vulnerability was caused by websites using this selector in conjunction with the location.hash source for animations or auto-scrolling to a particular element on the page. Because JavaScript is based on an international standard (ECMAScript), JavaScript encoding enables the support of international characters in programming constructs and variables in addition to alternate string representations (string escapes). The good news is that if user input is handled properly at the foundation level (e.g. There are many different output encoding methods because browsers parse HTML, JS, URLs, and CSS differently. eval This can lead to a range of attacks, including stealing sensitive information, hijacking user accounts, and spreading malware. If you're using JavaScript to change a CSS property, look into using style.property = x. In the above example, untrusted data started in the rendering URL context (href attribute of an a tag) then changed to a JavaScript execution context (javascript: protocol handler) which passed the untrusted data to an execution URL subcontext (window.location of myFunction). //The following does NOT work because of the encoded ";". This is because these sinks treat the variable as text and will never execute it. //The following DOES WORK because the encoded value is a valid variable name or function reference. Sometimes it's not possible to remove the functionality, and there is no library to sanitize the value and create a Trusted Type for you. Otherwise, again, your security efforts are void. This article looks at preventing Cross Site Scripting, a third common type of vulnerability in websites. If you use the default encoders then any you applied to character ranges to be treated as safe won't take effect - the default encoders use the safest encoding rules possible. For example, if your string appears within a double-quoted attribute then try to inject double quotes in your string to see if you can break out of the attribute. Encoding libraries often have a EncodeForJavaScript or similar to support this function. In general, HTML encoding serves to castrate HTML tags which are placed in HTML and HTML attribute contexts. Some pure DOM-based vulnerabilities are self-contained within a single page. This site is our home for content to help you on that journey, written by members of the Chrome team, and external experts. For instance, jQuery's attr() function can change the attributes of DOM elements. DOM-based Cross-site Scripting (DOM XSS) is a particular type of a Cross-site Scripting vulnerability. See how our software enables the world to secure the web. Never rely on validation alone. Cross-Site Scripting, or XSS, is a type of web vulnerability that allows an attacker to inject malicious code into a website or web application. We will look at eval, href and dangerouslySetHTML vulnerabilities. If you have to use user input on your page, always use it in the text context, never as HTML tags or any other potential code. . Trusted Types heavily reduce the DOM XSS attack surface of your application. Other JavaScript methods which take code as a string types will have a similar problem as outline above (setTimeout, setInterval, new Function, etc.). DOM-based cross-site scripting happens when data from a user controlled, Most of the violations like this can also be detected by running a code linter or, If the sanitization logic in DOMPurify is buggy, your application might still have a DOM XSS vulnerability. Use one of the following approaches to prevent code from being exposed to DOM-based XSS: The HTML, JavaScript and URL encoders are available to your code in two ways, you can inject them via dependency injection or you can use the default encoders contained in the System.Text.Encodings.Web namespace. Types of XSS attacks since mid-2012: DOM-based XSS attacks in React. A script within the later response contains a sink which then processes the data in an unsafe way. Variables should not be interpreted as code instead of text. Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. Quoting also significantly reduces the characterset that you need to encode, making your application more reliable and the encoding easier to implement. Don't use untrusted input as part of a URL path. For each potential source, such as location, you first need to find cases within the page's JavaScript code where the source is being referenced. Even newer versions of jQuery can still be vulnerable via the $() selector sink, provided you have full control over its input from a source that doesn't require a # prefix. Scale dynamic scanning. There will be situations where you use a URL in different contexts. Cross-site Scripting (XSS) can seriously threaten individual users and companies whose websites may be infected. It is always a bad idea to use a user-controlled input in dangerous sources such as eval. The following charts details a list of critical output encoding methods needed to stop Cross Site Scripting. Therefore there is little change in the encoding rules for URL attributes in an execution (DOM) context. Each variable used in the user interface should be passed through an output encoding function. There are a variety of sinks that are relevant to DOM-based vulnerabilities. Putting dynamic data within JavaScript code is especially dangerous because JavaScript encoding has different semantics for JavaScript encoded data when compared to other encodings. Frameworks make it easy to ensure variables are correctly validated and escaped or sanitised. In addition, WAFs also miss a class of XSS vulnerabilities that operate exclusively client-side. For many years DOM XSS has been one of the most prevalentand dangerousweb security vulnerabilities. An attacker can execute a DOM-based cross-site scripting attack if the web application writes user-supplied information directly to the Document Object Model (DOM) and there is no sanitization. For example if you want to use user input to write in a div tag element don't use innerHtml, instead use innerText or textContent. Finally, to fix the problem in our initial code, instead of trying to encode the output correctly which is a hassle and can easily go wrong we would simply use element.textContent to write it in a content like this: It does the same thing but this time it is not vulnerable to DOM based cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. It is an informational message with a simple alert. (It's free!). Get help and advice from our experts on all things Burp. This fact makes it more difficult to maintain web application security. The attacker can manipulate this data to include XSS content on the web page, for example, malicious JavaScript code. Working example (no HTML encoding): Normally encoded example (Does Not Work DNW): HTML encoded example to highlight a fundamental difference with JavaScript encoded values (DNW): If HTML encoding followed the same semantics as JavaScript encoding. For example, here we have some JavaScript that changes an anchor element's href attribute using data from the URL: You can exploit this by modifying the URL so that the location.search source contains a malicious JavaScript URL. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is a misnomer. innerHTML, outerHTML,insertAdjacentHTML, <iframe> srcdoc, document.write, document.writeln, and DOMParser.parseFromString, Executing plugin content: <embed src>, <object data> and <object codebase>, Runtime JavaScript code compilation: eval, setTimeout, setInterval, new Function(). Customization of the safe list only affects encoders sourced via DI. The most common source for DOM XSS is the URL, which is typically accessed with the window.location object. If you utilize fully qualified URLs then this will break the links as the colon in the protocol identifier (http: or javascript:) will be URL encoded preventing the http and javascript protocols from being invoked. Definition DOM Based XSS (or as it is called in some texts, "type-0 XSS") is an XSS attack wherein the attack payload is executed as a result of modifying the DOM "environment" in the victim's browser used by the original client side script, so that the client side code runs in an "unexpected" manner. element.SetAttribute () element [attribute]= If these methods are provided with untrusted input, then an XSS vulnerability could result. 99% of the time it is an indication of bad or lazy programming practice, so simply don't do it instead of trying to sanitize the input. It uses HTML attribute encoding rules whenever you use the @ directive. CSS Contexts refer to variables placed into inline CSS. DOM-based XSS is an attack that modifies the domain object model (DOM) on the client side ( the browser). Quoting makes it difficult to change the context a variable operates in, which helps prevent XSS. There are other places in JavaScript where JavaScript encoding is accepted as valid executable code. Free, lightweight web application security scanning for CI/CD. The application logic returns an unsafe input as part of the response without rendering it safely or storing data generated by users. Products Insight Platform Solutions XDR & SIEM INSIGHTIDR Threat Intelligence THREAT COMMAND Vulnerability Management INSIGHTVM Dynamic Application Security Testing INSIGHTAPPSEC To actually exploit this classic vulnerability, you'll need to find a way to trigger a hashchange event without user interaction. This view outputs the contents of the untrustedInput variable. In a stored DOM XSS vulnerability, the server receives data from one request, stores it, and then includes the data in a later response. All of this code originates on the server, which means it is the application owner's responsibility to make it safe from XSS, regardless of the type of XSS flaw it is. The document.write sink works with script elements, so you can use a simple payload, such as the one below: Note, however, that in some situations the content that is written to document.write includes some surrounding context that you need to take account of in your exploit. . The name originated from early versions of the attack where stealing data cross-site was the primary focus. A rendering context is associated with the parsing of HTML tags and their attributes. The example that follows illustrates using closures to avoid double JavaScript encoding.