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XSS-Proxy is an advanced Cross-Site-Scripting (XSS) attack tool. The documents, tools and other content on this site assume you have a basic understanding of XSS issues and existing exploitation methods. If you are not famliar with XSS, then I recommend you check out the primer links/docs below to get a better of idea of what XSS is and how to detect it, fix it, and exploit it.
Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
CERT info on XSS
CGISecurity’s Cross Site Scripting FAQ
Gunter Ollmann’s XSS paper
PeterW’s Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Concept
SecureNet’s Session Riding paper
Some Common Misconceptions about XSS
- “A user has to click a link to be impacted by XSS.” No – if you visit a page that has your browser will run it regardless of you clicking a link. I carefully crafted this example so it would not be run by your browser, but I could have put real script tags/commands here and made you run then transparently.
- “XSS only matters with bulliten boards, blogs, and other sites where an attacker can upload script content.” That is one way the attack can happen, but an attacker can also leverage sites that allow HTML/SCRIPT tags to be reflected back to the same user (like a search form that repeats what it was told to look for in the response). These flaws are commonly combined with public site redirects or emails to attack a second site.
- “Don’t XSS attacks just create popup windows, alerts and other pesky things?” No – They are commonly used to reveal your cookies or form based login info to attackers. After havesting this info, the attacker uses it to log into the same site as you.
- “I understand XSS, but I don’t think it’s a huge issue“. I think you’ll change your mind once you understand this advanced attack. Read the advanced stuff below and play with XSS-Proxy to see how evil XSS really can be.
You can download XSS-Proxy here:
Or read more here.
Pantagruel says
Thanks for the info.
We had an intro of a new online ordering system some days ago. It relied heavily on the internal database of goods. But for well known suppliers their was an option to ‘patch-through’ into their website, process an order and retrieve the necesarry info into the mother application. I asked them about a possible xss vuln, but the tech didn’t know wha it was and started blabbing about vpn connection between machine’s etc.
After reading through this I am itching, but since they will be my ex-employer within 2 months (got laid off but have found a new job quite quickly) it will be their problem to solve.
goodpeople says
XSS is a relatively new an unknown method to the public. I fear that we’ll see alot of XSS attacks in the future. Security just recently became an issue for developers of web applications.
Commonly heard misconception: I’m using mysql, so i’m not vulnerable to XSS..
navin says
milw0rm has numerous XSS exploits fr mysql databases!!
Cor-Paul says
@Pantagruel: their problem to solve.. yours to exploit? ;)
abcd says
alert(‘html’);