dom based cross site scripting prevention

HTML attribute encoding is a superset of HTML encoding and encodes additional characters such as " and '. OWASP are producing framework specific cheatsheets for React, Vue, and Angular. What is Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and How to Prevent It? Please refer to the list below for details. XSS Prevention & Mitigation. Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a web security issue that sees cyber criminals execute malicious scripts on legitimate or trusted websites. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is a security vulnerability which enables an attacker to place client side scripts (usually JavaScript) into web pages. If you must, the following examples describe some approaches that do and do not work. Please insert your password to refresh your session. XSS is one of the most common and dangerous web vulnerabilities, and it is . In many cases the context isn't always straightforward to discern. Then client-side encode (using a JavaScript encoding library such as node-esapi) for the individual subcontext (DOM methods) which untrusted data is passed to. For example, when your application passes a string to innerHTML, the browser sends the following report: This says that in https://my.url.example/script.js on line 39 innerHTML was called with the string beginning with <img src=x. Fewer XSS bugs appear in applications built with modern web frameworks. Customization of the safe list only affects encoders sourced via DI. Before putting untrusted data into a URL query string ensure it's URL encoded. XSS attacks occur when an attacker uses a web application to send malicious code, generally in the form of a browser side script, to a different end user. The difference between Reflected/Stored XSS is where the attack is added or injected into the application. Trusted Types force you to process a value. DOM-based cross-site scripting (DOM XSS) is a web vulnerability, a subtype of cross-site scripting. The reasoning behind this is to protect against unknown or future browser bugs (previous browser bugs have tripped up parsing based on the processing of non-English characters). The attacker can manipulate this data to include XSS content on the webpage, for example, malicious JavaScript code. 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. This behavior was often implemented using a vulnerable hashchange event handler, similar to the following: As the hash is user controllable, an attacker could use this to inject an XSS vector into the $() selector sink. DOM XSS: An Explanation of DOM-based Cross-site Scripting This article looks at preventing Cross Site Scripting, a third common type of vulnerability in websites. Web Application Firewalls - These look for known attack strings and block them. These locations are known as dangerous contexts. In an XSS attack, an attacker uses web-pages or web applications to send malicious code and compromise users' interactions with a vulnerable application. Despite being rare, they may cause serious problems and only a few scanners can detect them. This is why you would need to HTML encode too. Script manipulation: <script src> and setting text content of <script> elements. 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. Use only safe functions like document.innerText and document.textContent. There are two distinct groups of cross-site scripting. For DOM XSS, the attack is injected into the application during runtime in the client directly. HTML Context refers to inserting a variable between two basic HTML tags like a

or . Before putting untrusted data into JavaScript place the data in an HTML element whose contents you retrieve at runtime. This helps quickly identify a large chunk of violations. DOM based XSS is extremely difficult to mitigate against because of its large attack surface and lack of standardization across browsers. Content Security Policy - An allowlist that prevents content being loaded. The following are some of the main sinks that can lead to DOM-XSS vulnerabilities: The following jQuery functions are also sinks that can lead to DOM-XSS vulnerabilities: In addition to the general measures described on the DOM-based vulnerabilities page, you should avoid allowing data from any untrusted source to be dynamically written to the HTML document. In reflective and stored cross-site scripting attacks, you can see the vulnerability payload in the response page. When this happens, a script on the web page selects the URL variable and executes the code it contains. This could lead to an attack being added to a webpage.. for example. Avoid methods such as document.innerHTML and instead use safer functions, for example, document.innerText and document.textContent. WAFs are unreliable and new bypass techniques are being discovered regularly. In the case above, JavaScript encoding does not mitigate against DOM based XSS. Read the entire Acunetix Web Application Vulnerability Report. It uses the Document Object Model (DOM), which is a standard way to represent HTML objects in a hierarchical manner. If you directly access an encoder via System.Text.Encodings.Web. This brings up an interesting design point. Therefore, the primary recommendation is to avoid including untrusted data in this context. This document only discusses JavaScript bugs which lead to XSS. Canonicalize input, URL Validation, Safe URL verification, Allow-list http and HTTPS URLs only (Avoid the JavaScript Protocol to Open a new Window), Attribute encoder. Perhaps the non-conforming functionality is not needed anymore or can be rewritten in a modern way without using the error-prone functions?Don'tel.innerHTML = '<img src=xyz.jpg>'; Doel.textContent = '';const img = document.createElement('img');img.src = 'xyz.jpg';el.appendChild(img); Some libraries already generate Trusted Types that you can pass to the sink functions. In addition, WAFs also miss a class of XSS vulnerabilities that operate exclusively client-side. For instance, jQuery's attr() function can change the attributes of DOM elements. There are a couple of options for fixing a Trusted Type violation. It is always a bad idea to use a user-controlled input in dangerous sources such as eval. Framework Security Protections, Output Encoding, and HTML Sanitization will provide the best protection for your application. ESAPI is one of the few which works on an allow list and encodes all non-alphanumeric characters. The HTML parser of the rendering context dictates how data is presented and laid out on the page and can be further broken down into the standard contexts of HTML, HTML attribute, URL, and CSS. The Impact of Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities and their Prevention If data is read from a user-controlled source like the URL, then passed to the attr() function, then it may be possible to manipulate the value sent to cause XSS. Otherwise, again, your security efforts are void. Acunetix uses its DeepScan technology to attempt DOM XSS against the client-side code and report vulnerabilities. The following snippets of HTML demonstrate how to safely render untrusted data in a variety of different contexts. Avoid populating the following methods with untrusted data. If your code looked like the following, you would need to only double JavaScript encode input data. More info about Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge. That said, you should also analyze the CSP violations, as these trigger when the non-conforming code is executed. 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. Ideally, the correct way to apply encoding and avoid the problem stated above is to server-side encode for the output context where data is introduced into the application. Free, lightweight web application security scanning for CI/CD. What is Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)? Definition and Prevention - Rapid7 URL Contexts refer to variables placed into a URL. DOM-based cross-site scripting (DOM XSS) is one of the most common web security vulnerabilities, and it's very easy to introduce it in your application. For example, you can use DOMPurify to sanitize an HTML snippet, removing XSS payloads. Avoid treating untrusted data as code or markup within JavaScript code. The most common source for DOM XSS is the URL, which is typically accessed with the window.location object. \u0064\u006f\u0063\u0075\u006d\u0065\u006e\u0074, \u0077\u0072\u0069\u0074\u0065\u006c\u006e, "\u0048\u0065\u006c\u006c\u006f\u0020\u0057\u006f\u0072\u006c\u0064", "\u0061\u006c\u0065\u0072\u0074\u0028\u0031\u0031\u0029", "url(<%=ESAPI.encoder().encodeForJavascript(ESAPI.encoder().encodeForURL(companyName))%>)", '<%=ESAPI.encoder().encodeForJavascript(ESAPI.encoder().encodeForURL(userRelativePath))%>', "<%= Encode.forJavaScript(untrustedData) %>", "<%=ESAPI.encoder().encodeForJavascript(untrustedData)%>", "customFunction('<%=doubleJavaScriptEncodedData%>', y)", //HTML encoding is happening in JavaScript, "javascript:myFunction('<%=untrustedData%>', 'test');", "javascript:myFunction('<%=ESAPI.encoder().encodeForJavascript(ESAPI.encoder().encodeForURL(untrustedData)) %>', 'test');",