Top 10 Web 2.0 Attack Vectors 64
Fred writes, "HNS is running a story about Web 2.0 and the new attack vectors it opens up. Worms of the Yamanner, Samy, and Spaceflash types are exploiting client-side AJAX frameworks, providing new avenues of attack and compromising confidential information. On the server side, XML-based Web services are providing distributed application access through Web services interfaces and opening up new vulnerabilities in the process." The article is spread over 6 short pages and there is no printer-friendly URL.
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Off-topic (Score:5, Funny)
Boy...I really hope Web 2.0 markup language allows for longer page length.
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Its the first time that I've seen a slashdot article say something useful
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Are you referring to this actual article about the so-called "Web 2.0"..? What's becoming of the world today? *cries quietly into his Amiga 1200*
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As a bonus, you won't preserve the browser culture of this era.
pretty soon, you will need big blue (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, shouldn't 2.0 come equipped with some things that make it safer, not just more flashy?
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Re:pretty soon, you will need big blue (Score:5, Insightful)
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Holy cow! How is the grandparent marked insightful!
I should start a business selling shrinkwrapped boxes labeled "Web 2.0" with install discs for IE 6 and Firefox 1.x. I'll make millions!
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Re:pretty soon, you will need big blue (Score:5, Insightful)
You see it over and over again: Fantacy football sites that let you select players that aren't available by POSTing their id. A site that lets you delete your account but accepts the user ID you send in a POST without validating it (so replacing the ID with '%' deletes ALL accounts.)
These things should only be rookie mistakes. Yeah, validating data takes time to code. But if you don't do it you are just asking to be hacked.
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I mean, it's obvious, a lot of developer are jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon but obviously they never worked with Web 1.0.
Article Text (Score:5, Informative)
by Shreeraj Shah - net square - Monday, 9 October 2006.
Web 2.0 is the novel term coined for new generation Web applications. start.com, Google maps, Writely and MySpace.com are a few examples. The shifting technological landscape is the driving force behind these Web 2.0 applications. On the one hand are Web services that are empowering server-side core technology components and on the other hand are AJAX and Rich Internet Application (RIA) clients that are enhancing client-end interfaces in the browser itself.
XML is making a significant impact at both presentation and transport (HTTP/HTTPS) layers. To some extent XML is replacing HTML at the presentation layer while SOAP is becoming the XML-based transport mechanism of choice.
Web 2.0 security concerns - reshaping the industry
This technological transformation is bringing in new security concerns and attack vectors into existence. Yamanner, Samy and Spaceflash type worms are exploiting "client-side" AJAX frameworks, providing new avenues of attack and compromising some of the confidential information.
On the "server-side", XML based Web services are replacing some of the key functionalities and providing distributed application access through Web services interfaces. These remote capabilities to invoke methods over GET, POST or SOAP from the Web browser itself provide new openings to applications. On other side, RIA frameworks running on XML, XUL, Flash, Applets and JavaScripts are adding new possible sets of vectors. RIA, AJAX and Web services are adding new dimensions to Web application security.
Here is the list of 10 attack vectors along with a brief overview of each:
In the last few months, several cross-site scripting attacks have been observed, where malicious JavaScript code from a particular Web site gets executed on the victim's browser thereby compromising information. A recent example is the Yamanner worm that exploited cross-site scripting opportunities in Yahoo mail's AJAX call. Another recent example is the Samy worm that exploited MySpace.com's cross-site scripting flaw. AJAX gets executed on the client-side by allowing an incorrectly written script to be exploited by an attacker. The attacker is only required to craft a malicious link to coax unsuspecting users to visit a certain page from their Web browsers. This vulnerability existed in traditional applications as well but AJAX has added a new dimension to it.
XML traffic goes back and forth between server and browser in many of the WEB 2.0 applications. Web applications consume XML blocks coming from AJAX clients. It is possible to poison this XML block. Not uncommon is the technique to apply recursive payloads to similar-producing XML nodes multiple times. If the engine's handling is poor this may result in a denial of services on the server. Many attackers also produce malformed XML documents that can disrupt logic depending on parsing mechanisms in use on the server. There are two types of parsing mechanisms available on the server side - SAX and DOM. This same attack vector is also used with Web services since they consume SOAP messages and SOAP messages are nothing but XML messages. Large-scale adaptation of XMLs at the application layer opens up new opportunities to use this new attack vector.
XML external entity reference is an XML property which can be manipulated by an attacker. This can lead to arbitrary file or TCP connection openings that can be leveraged by an attacker. XML schema poisoning is another XML poisoning attack vector which can change execution flow. This vulnerability can help an attacker to compromise confidential information.
AJAX calls are very silent and end-users would not be able to determine whether or not the browser is making silent calls using the XMLHTTPRequest object. When the browser makes an AJAX call to any Web site it replay
Buzzwords (Score:5, Funny)
ojdsafdo fuck
Words mean something, even buzzwords (Score:2)
Would this be better?
Marklar, my eyes started to bleed Marklar Marklar Marklar Marklar WEB2.0 Marklar Marklar
On second thought, maybe you are right.
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XML: Extensible Markup Language www.w3c.org/XML, a markup language
SAX: Simple API for XML, an API for accessing XML
AJAX: Asynchronous Javascript And XML, a BUZZWORD
WEB2.0: a BUZZWORD
XMLHTTPRequestObject: an object to post (or handle) XML requests made over HTTP (core of ajax).
RSS: Really Simple Sindication, a protocol(?) for aggregating web content.
Not all acronyms are buzzwords - N.A^3.B
XSRF (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I know this can't be done with Ajax, since XHR can't make crossdomain requests. However there are other techniques for this, including hidden forms, iframes, images, etc. This is commonly known as Cross-site request forgery (XSRF) [wikipedia.org] and is a major problem but not getting much publicity. I guess someone needs to write a MySpace worm that utilizes this technique before people start realizing it's a problem.
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"Don't publicise this security hole! My ability to enhance functionality on internet forums depends upon it!"
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Screw over MySpace users and bring to light a potentially devestating new attack, all at the same time? That sounds win-win to me. I'm on it.
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XHR can be crossdomain... (Score:2)
There are ways around that [dojotoolkit.org]...
However in a way it doesn't matter if you're using pure Javascript or a XMLHTTPRequest to send the request to the remote server, the results are the same. If you're developing secure web sites you still need to worry about this possibility.
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No substance (Score:5, Interesting)
And there's also this "attacking scripts in RSS": what was this supposed to mean? My RSS readers don't execute script in RSS. No examples, no links.
One more talked about hijacking confidential information from a bank cookie. No example how this is done, just the author assumes we know how to automatically sniff the cookie, and that the bank doesn't use server-side sessions like 99% of them out there, but stores it all in a plain cookie.
Basically the article is not as fun or informative as the title suggests.
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Re:No substance (Score:4, Interesting)
Samy's worm did exactly that.
Relevent extract from his fascinating account [www.namb.la], well worth reading in its entirety:
I must say I was quite impressed, not to mention frightened half to death, by what Samy went through to create his worm. It was not a simple task at all. I had thought before that nobody would waste their time doing something like this; I was, of course, wrong.
The consequence of his story is that I changed my own social networking site [amazing.com] to become a lot more secure. I didn't like doing it because I would have preferred to let people do what they want, but that artilce was a real eye opener as to how dangerous that would have been.
D
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I am disappointed by the lack of substance, as well. This piece is intended for managers, so they can sound like they know what they're talking about.
Re:No substance (Score:4, Insightful)
Not everyone's using an RSS reader from four years ago. =) Many RSS readers allow rendering of HTML. Heck, I'm using Bloglines, which is a web-based RSS reader; guess whether or not it supports HTML? However, it's up to the client to scrub the content properly and remove <script> crap.
Another question is, exactly how can you expect to launch an attack in a web feed? People use bazillion different RSS/Atom readers, and in many cases they're entirely separate from their web browsers...
Though, I hope people read the Atom spec [ietf.org] if they're implementing it, scrubbing HTML content is specifically addressed in the "Security Considerations": "Atom Processors should pay particular attention to the security of the IMG, SCRIPT, EMBED, OBJECT, FRAME, FRAMESET, IFRAME, META, and LINK elements, but other elements might also have negative security properties."
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They do work in my desktop aggregator (NetNewsWire) and I've seen it work in some other aggregators.
Sujal
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http://www.spidynamics.com/assets/documents/Hackin gFeeds.pdf [spidynamics.com] (warning: pdf)
http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/cross-context-scrip ting-with-sage/ [gnucitizen.org]
etc, etc.
However, I agree that most of the points were simply various different ways unchecked user input can be exploited, and the banking example was absolutely horrible.
My overall impression was that the author either had n
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Use good practices (Score:2, Insightful)
Consider the following:
- Ajax inevitably increases the overall complexity of the system.
- Typically, many web services with
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http://shiflett.org/archive/263 [shiflett.org]
Who did that? (Score:2)
Really, kdawson, we're not so hard up for stories around here that this should be an okay thing to do. And it isn't as if you didn't look at the article first... what's up?
Argghh (Score:1)
The shifting literary landscape is the driving force behind these Word 2.0 articles. On the one hand are buzzwords that are empowering author-side core diction components and on the othe
JSON and other patterns can be dangerous (Score:5, Informative)
In order to detect these sorts of vulnerabilities in an automated fashion, there are only two decent approaches to choose from:
- Dynamic analysis: Feed the entire site, page by page, to a live browser and try to reproduce the XSS using a large number of browser actions as input. This is practically difficult and could also be quite risky (you can get owned yourself while doing it), and to get a good test you need to run a large number of inputs on several different browsers.
- Static analysis: Spider the site and run static analysis on the JavaScript on a page-by-page basis. This is much more promising, although obviously static analysis on a language like JavaScript, which is loosey-goosey with typing, is not trivial. Shameless plug: There are only a couple of tools which can do this: NeXpose from Rapid7 [rapid7.com] is one of them that I have worked on.
JSON itself is kind of cool, but many AJAX toolkits (including the one from Google) do AJAX/JSON things like:var result = eval(document.responseText)
which is a bit scary when you think that it may be possible to trick the server into emitting JavaScript (which, given the limited kinds of filterings that servers do, could be easier than tricking the server into emitting HTML).
Top 10 Web 2.0 Attack Vectors? (Score:1)
RSS and Atom Feed Security Links (Score:3, Informative)
Paper: Feed Injection In Web 2.0: Hacking RSS and Atom Feed Implementations, Robert Auger 2006 [cgisecurity.com]
Blackhat Powerpoint Slides: Zero Day Subscriptions: Using RSS and Atom Feeds As Attack Delivery Systems (Power Point) [cgisecurity.com]
Additional Feed Security Documentation: http://www.cgisecurity.com/rss/ [cgisecurity.com]
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NO Surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
OMG... (Score:2, Funny)
These PEOPLE must be STOPPED before THE WORST happens!
Not News (Score:2, Informative)
JavaScript Must Be Destroyed! (Score:1)
"Carthago delenda est!" ("Carthage must be destroyed!")
- Cato the Elder to the Roman Senate
More information on cross scripting attacks.. (Score:1)