A Systematic Analysis of XSS Sanitization in Web Application Frameworks

While most research on XSS defense has focused on techniques for securing existing applications and re-architecting browser mechanisms, sanitization remains the industry-standard defense mechanism. By streamlining and automating XSS sanitization, web application frameworks stand in a good position to stop XSS but have received little research attention. In order to drive research on web frameworks, we systematically study the security of the XSS sanitization ions frameworks provide. We develop a novel model of the web browser and characterize the challenges of XSS sanitization. Based on the model, we syslly evaluate the XSS abstractions in 14 major commercially-used web frameworks. We find that frameworks often do not address critical parts of the XSS conundrum. We perform an empirical analysis of 8 large web applications to extract the requirements of sanitization primitives from the perspective of realworld applications. Our study shows that there is a wide gap between the abstracti...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ESORICS
• Authors: Joel Weinberger, Prateek Saxena, Devdatta Akhawe, Matthew Finifter, Eui Chul Richard Shin, Dawn Song
• Keywords: ESORICS 2011, Realworld Applications, Security Privacy, Web Frameworks, Wide Gap