Some Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vectors arise from strict but allowed possibilities, forming tricky combinations. It’s all about contexts and sometimes the interaction between different contexts with different filters lead to some interesting bypasses.

Although in the same document (or page), usually the source code of a HTTP response is formed by 3 different contexts: HTML, Javascript and CSS. They have their own syntax and different filters are applied to the  output of user input to avoid XSS situations.

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Testing for Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) might seem easy at first sight, with several hacking tools automating this process. But regardless of how tests to find a XSS are performed, automated or manually, here we will see a step-by-step procedure to try to find most of the XSS cases out there.

For that we will use the same approach employed by KNOXSS, our online XSS PoC tool. Although without details of its own implementation and intermediary steps needed to make its decisions (which will be done by ourselves if we follow the tests manually), this will cover pretty much what is done by this unique tool.

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In some cases, an information passed in one of the HTTP headers of the application is not correctly sanitized and it’s outputted somewhere in the requested page or in another end, giving rise to a XSS situation.

But unfortunately, once an attacker can’t make a victim to edit his/her own HTTP headers in an actual XSS attack, those scenarios can only be exploited if the attacker payload remains stored somehow. Continue reading →

Testing for XSS vulnerabilities requires knowing the data format of input. Usually the format is simply “string” without any restrictions but sometimes the manipulation of XSS entry point is limited.

In most of times it might lead to the assumption of a security filter, one designed/employed specifically to avoid the attack which is not true.

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Simple JavaScript injections like ‘-alert(1)-’ or even \’-alert(1)// (see cases #6 and #7 here) are usually enough to pop an alert box in a vulnerable page when an input reflection happens inside a script block and no HTML injection is possible (case #5 of same post above).

But there are cases where the injection point lands in the middle of a more complex JS code: inside functions and conditionals (if or if+else), nested inside each other.

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