hackademix.net

Internet Explorer 8’s famous XSS filter can be exploited to perform successful XSS attacks against web sites which would be otherwise safe. In other words, XSS “protection” is helping XSS attackers, oh the irony.

Well, this is not exactly news among security researchers, but those aware of the details (including Microsoft of course, Eduardo “Sirdarckcat” Vela and myself) have kept a low profile so far. Check, for instance, slide #17 in my OWASP presentation (alternate link), given two weeks ago.

However, after Microsoft left it unfixed for many months, someone apparently decided to whisper this dirty little secret in Dan Goodin (The Register)’s ear.

To Microsoft’s credit, this problem has no quick fix: in fact, it’s way worse than a simple implementation bug. Its root is a flawed design choice: when a potential XSS attack is detected, IE 8 modifies the response (the content of the target page) in order to neuter the malicious code. This is, incidentally, the only significant departure from NoScript’s approach, which modifies the request (the data sent by the client) instead, and is therefore immune.

Anyway, here’s the juice: IE 8’s response-changing mechanism can be easily exploited to turn a normally innocuous fragment of the victim page into a XSS injection. The attacker just needs a certain degree of control on the content of the web site to be injected: social networks, forums, wikis and even Google Apps are good prey. To be fair, Google Apps are not vulnerable anymore, since Google’s properties wisely choose to deploy the X-XSS-Protection: 0 header, which is the “safety switch” disabling IE 8’s XSS protection.

So, web site owners’ dilemma is, opt out or not opt out?
For browser users, there should be no dilemma at all ;-)

When Microsoft unveiled its IE 8’s “XSS filters”, almost one year ago, we could notice how, despite their impressive resemblance to NoScript’s anti-XSS protection, they were quite limited in comparison.

One of the limitations was their ability to mitigate a subset of reflective (AKA type 1) XSS vulnerabilities only, leaving them totally useless against DOM-based (AKA type 0) XSS attacks which, instead, are effectively defeated by NoScript.

Today I noticed via sla.ckers.org that such a DOM-based XSS attack is currently possible against Paypal and Ebay, no less, allowing the attacker to steal authentication info and other sensitive data, or even perform financial transactions on the behalf of the victim.

Even more interesting, modern browsers* except IE properly encode request URLs before sending them on the wire, but exploitation of this specific Paypal vulnerability requires the “double quotes” character to pass through with no encoding: therefore, while the vast majority of XSS exploits are cross-browser, this one affects exclusively IE**. Embrace and XSStend?

1. * Latest versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome.
2. ** Variants could affect any browser, since IE’s encoding bug is generally not required for DOM-based XSS. Firefox users can protect themselves by using NoScript, even in the permissive and not recommended “Allow Scripts Globally” mode.

Thanks to IE8’s touted Clickjacking protection which will work on those pages whose authors decide to adopt the new proprietary X-FRAME-OPTIONS header (now cross-browser), the buzz about this topic has been raising again. Unluckily, Clickjacking (or more precisely, talking about IE8’s mitigations, “frame-based UI Redressing”) is not well understood enough yet for the “technical” press to spare us some frankly embarrassing articles:

• Redmond Magazine, Clickjacking Flaw Hits Chrome and Firefox
• SC Magazine (for Security Professionals!), Google working on fix for clickjacking vulnerability in Chrome
• eWeek, From IE 8 to Google Chrome, Keep an Eye on Clickjacking
• ZDNet/CNet News, Chrome, Firefox face clickjacking

And so on…
Even Heise Security fell in this trap, sigh. The mood of most of these “reports” is, more or less,

Look ma, there’s this Clickjacking PoC which works in Chrome and Firefox, but is defeated in IE8, which has Clickjacking Protection^TM. Did you see? IE is the most secure browser of the pack, OMGROTFLMAO!!!

Now, I know the ones to really blame and bash here are this so called “security firm” looking for (and finding) free advertisement by exploiting the security buzzword of the day, and the “security researcher” Aditya K. Sood. But why did nobody of these journalists and bloggers try to verify Secniche’s claims (and orthography)?

Clickjacking is a malicious software form that can seemingly take control of the links that an Internet browser displays for various Web pages. Once that takes place, and once a user tries to lick (sic!) on that link, the user is taken to a site that is unintended. In some cases, the user may be able to recognize this immediately; in other cases, the user may be totally unaware of what took place.Once an infected ad has been loaded into your browser, your clipboard (where you copy and paste text) becomes overwritten with a URL.

A vulnerability across a variety of browsers and platforms, a clickjacking takes the form of embedded code or script that can execute without the user’s knowledge, such as clicking on a button that appears to perform another functionThe exploit may also take over your browser and visit links without you knowing.

A clickjacked page tricks a user into performing undesired actions by clicking on a concealed link. On a clickjacked page, the attackers show a set of dummy buttons, then load another page over it in a transparent layer. The user thinks he is clicking the visible buttons, while he/she is actually performing actions on the hidden page.

The hidden page may be an authentic page, and therefore the attackers can trick users into performing actions which the users never intended to do and there is no way of tracing such actions later, as the user was genuinely authenticated on the other page.

Well, by these standards (and grammar and syntax), hereby I disclose my sensational “Clickjacking PoC” which works everywhere, even against IE8 RC1:

Clickjack The Target (http://www.yahoo.com) : (http://evil.hackademix.net)

Even better, mine is just 188 characters long, i.e. 1/3 of the one by Secniche:

<a href="http://yahoo.com"
onclick="location='http://evil.hackademix.net/images/stallowned.jpg';return false"
>Clickjack The Target (http://www.yahoo.com) : (http://evil.hackademix.net)</a>

Unfortunately, like I told Heise guys (who honestly rectified their article):

that’s not Clickjacking by any stretch of imagination, and hardly malicious: you just get on a “surprise” destination, but nothing more since it can’t do any of the cross-site evils (e.g. bypassing CSRF protection) of the real thing.

Or, quoting Michał Zalewski’s answer to Mr. Sood on BugTraq:

1) It is by now well-understood that because of the inherent and broadly depended on properties of HTML, every sufficiently featured browser is and likely will remain susceptible to the behavior known as clickjacking. A more thorough analysis, also covering Chrome, is provided here:

http://code.google.com/p/browsersec/wiki/Part2#Arbitrary_page_mashups_(UI_redressing)

2) To my best knowledge, the proof of concept provided in your post, where a same-origin <div> follows a mouse pointer, is not a valid demonstration of the issue at hand.

Nor is mine, of course: LickJacking, maybe ;)

Talking about rectifications, Security Watch’s apology of Microsoft’s take on Clickjacking protection, while defending X-FRAME-OPTIONS against the general skepticism from security experts, emphatically warned twice that “NoScript won’t protect you”. Larry Seltzer’s premise, “JavaScript is not required for the attack” was obviously correct, but unfortunately for him (and fortunately for Firefox users), NoScript doesn’t rely on script blocking to defeat the attack. He had apparently never heard about ClearClick, the specific anti-Clickjacking protection provided by NoScript, which is extremely effective even if JavaScript is enabled (or the attack is scriptless). Ironically, ClearClick is also the only available implementation of Michał Zalewski’s “favorite solution”, which his article even tries to explain.

However, as soon as I managed to tell him about his mistake (after working around the unbelievable suckiness of PCMag’s spam filters, which coughed on any sentence of medium complexity and even on the word “google”), Larry demonstrated solid deontology. He honestly admitted to have been misled by an ancient post by RSnake, which actually reported that older NoScript versions could be circumvented by some Clickjacking setups, while more recent (ClearClick enabled) versions are effectively protected. Larry, I did appreciate that, and I’m sorry I couldn’t post not even a simple “thanks” as a comment on your Security Watch blog (danx? th3nx? 10x?)

As I promised in my previous posts about so called IE8’s “Clickjacking protection”, some hours ago I released the NoScript 1.8.9.9 development build, featuring experimental but complete compatibility with the X-FRAME-OPTIONS header support introduced by IE8 and unveiled yesterday by Eric Lawrence on the IE Blog.

As I said previously,

this is just a cross-browser compatibility effort: neither Firefox nor NoScript really need this feature. Traditional JavaScript-based frame busting works fine in Firefox, giving it the same degree of (modest) “protection” as IE8. NoScript users, on the other hand, are already fully protected, because ClearClick is the one and only countermeasure which works against any type of Clickjacking (frame or embed based), no matter if web sites cooperate or not.

However I also said this is nice to have. I had already imagined a functionally similar declarative solution, the SUB pseudo-method of ABE rules, and HTTP-based restrictions can actually be easier to deploy in some scenarios (e.g. using a Web Application Firewall).

More important, not every IT manager will have a chance of reading the reasons I exposed so far, explaining why IE8 has no more “Clickjacking protection” than its competitors. Our typical decision maker will just read a bullet list including “Clickjacking protection”, will find that no other browser dares such a claim and will base his choice (also) on that misleading comparison.

So let’s add this bullet, even if it does nothing against Clickjacking that “alternative browsers” couldn’t already do with traditional frame busting.

The following screenshot shows the original IE8 implementation as can be tested on my demo page:

And this is X-IFRAME-OPTIONS in action on Firefox (kindly provided by NoScript for now, but already in the works as a built-in):

But now that we’ve got “bullet parity”, let’s put the marketspeak aside and keep enjoying the only Clickjacking protection that really works “out of the box”: your friendly neighborhood ClearClick :)

Yesterday I published a blind analysis of the so called “Clickjacking protection” included in IE8 RC1. “Blind” because, hype aside, there was no technical documentation available, even if the feature was targeted to web developers who — in order to protect their users — should modify the way their pages are served.

After a while, Microsoft’s David Ross sent me an email confirming that my wild guesses about IE8’s approach, its scope and its limitations were indeed correct. The only information obviously missing from my “prophetic” description was the real name of the “X-I-Do-Not-Want-To-Be-Framed-Across-Domains” HTTP header to be sent before the sensible pages, and today this little mystery has been finally unveiled by Eric Lawrence on the IE Blog:

Web developers can send a HTTP response header named X-FRAME-OPTIONS with HTML pages to restrict how the page may be framed. If the X-FRAME-OPTIONS value contains the token DENY, IE8 will prevent the page from rendering if it will be contained within a frame. If the value contains the token SAMEORIGIN, IE will block rendering only if the origin of the top level-browsing-context is different than the origin of the content containing the X-FRAME-OPTIONS directive. For instance, if http://shop.example.com/confirm.asp contains a DENY directive, that page will not render in a subframe, no matter where the parent frame is located. In contrast, if the X-FRAME-OPTIONS directive contains the SAMEORIGIN token, the page may be framed by any page from the exact http://shop.example.com origin.

As I had anticipated, IE8’s “clickjacking protection” is just an alternate scriptless way to perform frame busting, a well known and simple technique to prevent a page from being “framed” in another page and therefore becoming an easy UI Redressing target. Microsoft had to follow its own special path because the traditional JavaScript implementation can be easily circumvented on IE, e.g. by loading the targeted page inside an <IFRAME SECURITY=restricted> element. But the other major browsers are equally “protected” (if we can call “browser protection” something relying on the good will and education of web authors) by “standard” frame busting. Therefore, slogans like “the first browser to counter this type of threat” (James Pratt, Microsoft senior product manager) were marketspeak at its best. Furthermore, this approach is useless against Clickjacking in its original “historical” meaning, i.e. those attacks involving Flash applets and other kinds of plugin embeddings which led Robert “RSnake” Hansen and Jeremiah Grossman to invent the successful buzzword.

However in my post I had also written that having such a scriptless alternative as a cross-browser option would be nice:

I do believe that a declarative approach to control subdocument requests is an excellent idea: otherwise I wouldn’t have included the SUB pseudo-method in ABE Rules Specification (pdf). Moreover, as soon as I’ve got some less blurry info (David Ross, I know you’re listening, why don’t you drop me a line?), I’ll be happy to immediately implement a compatible feature in NoScript and lobby Mozilla for inclusion in Firefox 3.1.

David kindly answered

I think this would be fantastic and it’s a great place to start building some bridges.

I agree, in facts I’ve filed an enhancement request for Firefox, and I’m already working to release a NoScript development build featuring X-FRAME-OPTIONS support: that’s relatively easy, since I can hook in the work I’m already doing for the ABE module. (Update 2009-29-01: I just released NoScript 1.8.9.9 development build, featuring full experimental X-FRAME-OPTIONS compatibility support).
It’s worth noticing, though, that this is just a cross-browser compatibility effort: neither Firefox nor NoScript really need this feature. Traditional JavaScript-based frame busting works fine in Firefox, giving it the same degree of (modest) “protection” as IE8. NoScript users, on the other hand, are already fully protected, because ClearClick is the one and only countermeasure which works against any type of Clickjacking (frame or embed based), no matter if web sites cooperate or not.

Speaking of NoScript, I’ve got a small but important correction to the otherwise excellent article Robert McMillan wrote for PC World (IDG News) yesterday:

Because clickjacking requires scripting, the attack doesn’t work when NoScript is enabled.

This statement is wrong twice:

1. Clickjacking does not require scripting: JavaScript might make the attacker’s life easier, but it’s not indispensable to throw an attack.
2. NoScript does not need scripting to be disabled in order to protect its users against Clickjacking: its exclusive ClearClick anti-Clickjacking technology works independently from script blocking.

That’s why NoScript can be recommended to anyone, even to grandma who’s not inclined to block JavaScript: albeit I do not encourage using NoScript’s “Allow Scripts Globally” command because the default deny policy is your best first-line defense, many additional protection features such as Anti-XSS filters and ClearClick still remain active even when JavaScript is enabled, providing the safest web experience available in any browser.