Biblio

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is an unremitting problem for the Web. Since its initial public documentation in 2000 until now, XSS has been continuously on top of the vulnerability statistics. Even though there has been a considerable amount of research and developer education to address XSS on the source code level, the overall number of discovered XSS problems remains high. Because of this, various approaches to mitigate XSS have been proposed as a second line of defense, with HTML sanitizers, Web Application Firewalls, browser-based XSS filters, and the Content Security Policy being some prominent examples. Most of these mechanisms focus on script tags and event handlers, either by removing them from user-provided content or by preventing their script code from executing. In this paper, we demonstrate that this approach is no longer sufficient for modern applications: We describe a novel Web attack that can circumvent all of theses currently existing XSS mitigation techniques. In this attack, the attacker abuses so called script gadgets (legitimate JavaScript fragments within an application's legitimate code base) to execute JavaScript. In most cases, these gadgets utilize DOM selectors to interact with elements in the Web document. Through an initial injection point, the attacker can inject benign-looking HTML elements which are ignored by these mitigation techniques but match the selector of the gadget. This way, the attacker can hijack the input of a gadget and cause processing of his input, which in turn leads to code execution of attacker-controlled values. We demonstrate that these gadgets are omnipresent in almost all modern JavaScript frameworks and present an empirical study showing the prevalence of script gadgets in productive code. As a result, we assume most mitigation techniques in web applications written today can be bypassed.

WebRTC is one of the latest additions to the ever growing repository of Web browser technologies, which push the envelope of native Web application capabilities. WebRTC allows real-time peer-to-peer audio and video chat, that runs purely in the browser. Unlike existing video chat solutions, such as Skype, that operate in a closed identity ecosystem, WebRTC was designed to be highly flexible, especially in the domains of signaling and identity federation. This flexibility, however, opens avenues for identity fraud. In this paper, we explore the technical underpinnings of WebRTC's identity management architecture. Based on this analysis, we identify three novel attacks against endpoint authenticity. To answer the identified threats, we propose and discuss defensive strategies, including security improvements for the WebRTC specifications and mitigation techniques for the identity and service providers.