From Facepalm to Brain Bender: Exploring Client-Side Cross-Site Scripting

Although studies have shown that at least one in ten Web pages contains a client-side XSS vulnerability, the prevalent causes for this class of Cross-Site Scripting have not been studied in depth. Therefore, in this paper, we present a large-scale study to gain insight into these causes. To this end, we analyze a set of 1,273 real-world vulnerabilities contained on the Alexa Top 10k domains using a specifically designed architecture, consisting of an infrastructure which allows us to persist and replay vulnerabilities to ensure a sound analysis. In combination with a taint-aware browsing engine, we can therefore collect important execution trace information for all flaws. Based on the observable characteristics of the vulnerable JavaScript, we derive a set of metrics to measure the complexity of each flaw. We subsequently classify all vulnerabilities in our data set accordingly to enable a more systematic analysis. In doing so, we find that although a large portion of all vulnerab...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Ben Stock, Stephan Pfistner, Bernd Kaiser, Sebastian Lekies, Martin Johns
• Keywords: CCS 2015, Security Privacy