Cross-site scripting is a pretty common vulnerability, even with many of the new advances in UI frameworks. One of the first things we mention when discussing the vulnerability is to understand the context. Is it HTML, Attribute, JavaScript, etc.? This understanding helps us better understand the types of characters that can be used to expose the vulnerability.
In this post, I want to take a quick look at placing data within a <script> tag. In particular, I want to look at how embedded <script> tags are processed. Let’s use a simple web page as our example.
<html> <head> </head> <body> <script> var x = "<a href=test.html>test</a>"; </script> </body> </html>
The above example works as we expect. When you load the page, nothing is displayed. The link tag embedded in the variable is rated as a string, not parsed as a link tag. What happens, though, when we embed a <script> tag?
<html> <head> </head> <body> <script> var x = "<script>alert(9)</script>"; </script> </body> </html>
In the above snippet, actually nothing happens on the screen. Meaning that the alert box does not actually trigger. This often misleads people into thinking the code is not vulnerable to cross-site scripting. if the link tag is not processed, why would the script tag be. In many situations, the understanding is that we need to break out of the (“) delimiter to start writing our own JavaScript commands. For example, if I submitted a payload of (test”;alert(9);t = “). This type of payload would break out of the x variable and add new JavaScript commands. Of course, this doesn’t work if the (“) character is properly encoded to not allow breaking out.
Going back to our previous example, we may have overlooked something very simple. It wasn’t that the script wasn’t executing because it wasn’t being parsed. Instead, it wasn’t executing because our JavaScript was bad. Our issue was that we were attempting to open a <script> within a <script>. What if we modify our value to the following:
<html> <head> </head> <body> <script> var x = "</script><script>alert(9)</script>"; </script> </body> </html>
In the above code, we are first closing out the original <script> tag and then we are starting a new one. This removes the embedded nuance and when the page is loaded, the alert box will appear.
This technique works in many places where a user can control the text returned within the <script> element. Of course, the important remediation step is to make sure that data is properly encoded when returned to the browser. By default, Content Security Policy may not be an immediate solution since this situation would indicate that inline scripts are allowed. However, if you are limiting the use of inline scripts to ones with a registered nonce would help prevent this technique. This reference shows setting the nonce (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Content-Security-Policy/script-src).
When testing our applications, it is important to focus on the lack of output encoding and less on the ability to fully exploit a situation. Our secure coding standards should identify the types of encoding that should be applied to outputs. If the encodings are not properly implemented then we are citing a violation of our standards.