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Cross Site Scripting Discovered in Google
Security Test writes "Yair Amit posted a message early this morning to The Web Security Mailing List outlining a Cross Site Scripting flaw in Google that allows an attacker to carry out Phishing Attacks."
Get off my launchpad!
Maybe you should have read TFA. It was fixed some time ago.
Did you RTFA?
Although the article details an interesting exploit, Google fixed this on the 1st of this month--The title is somewhat misleading. It is useful to know that Google fixed this vulnerability 2 weeks after it was discovered, on November 15th.
Also, for those of us unaccustomed to DD/MM/YYYY date format, that's the format of all dates in the article.
Grammar Lesson: you're is a contraction of "you are"; your means you possess something; yore means days gone by.
From the message:
--[ Discovery Date: 15/11/2005
--[ Initial Vendor Response: 15/11/2005
--[ Issue solved: 01/12/2005
Message posted: 21/12/2005
They did give them a chance to fix it first.
They've had others in the past, but were quick to fix them. They have even sent t-shirts as thanks for the help. Other sites are not so friendly or fast. This site shows active security holes in various sites that have gone unresolved. (CSS, insecure logins, etc)
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
A known issue is better then an unknown issue. With a known issue people will be more aware and be less likly to fall victum.
Reality is a big nasty dragon. Fortunately I don't believe in dragons.
I turned javascript off in 1999, just one less glaring security issue for me to address. Before anyone starts talking smack about responsive web apps, just remind me what Ed Felton said about flying pigs.
That's right, disable js and fix the web!
How is this insightful? Someone please tell me?
It's already been fixed!
response was something like: "We will work on it; or we wont - but we wont tell you
Which sucks...
Here we go:
Original:i on=SelectMenu&SMID=EigenesOrderbuch&MenuName=&Init Href=http://www.consti.de/secure
/Fälschung --> Imitation /
https://www.vr-ebanking.de/index.php?RZBK=0280
MY Version (XSS):
https://www.vr-ebanking.de/help;jsessionid=XA?Act
... Hope they change their mind, sometime. :)
Consti / thr0n
Now we're going to start posting every freaking XSS we find? This is a VERY low impact XSS vul. Hell it's not even persistent. Who freaking cares? Are we going to post the slew of recent Yahoo XSS bugs too? WHat about the bug in Google Analytics which allowed you to iterate through all the customer domains?
If there ever was an endorsement for web-based applications, this is it. When a bug is fixed in Windows or Linux, it stays active in the wild for months or years because many users don't update. With web apps the user basically gets an "update" each time they visit the site. If Google fixed the problem on December 1, the vulnerability could have been announced the same day without any kind of negative impact.
The downside is that this only works if the app provider is a proprietary vendor with a closed architecture. If 3rd parties are allowed to create extensions or if users can create their own utilities/add-ons then centralized patching would likely introduce the same types of incompatibilities and breakages that current OS patches can introduce. Worse, centralized control might mean that users have no choice but to live with the patched version.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I'm always blown away by how the Internet security market works and self-correct itself without any regulation.
A major web site has a flaw. White hat and black hat "hackers" find that flaw, exploit it, and either abuse it or let the web site know about it. The web programmers go in and close the exploit because it affects how their customers use the service and could open them up to some liability.
This is the way the free market works. I'm a huge fan of how quickly the Internet (anthropomorphically) adapts to the changing needs of the billion of users. Some exploits that aren't fixed by the owners of code are fixed by third parties -- sometimes for profit and sometimes for free. Before we can even write one law to attempt to solve problems, others are already attacking the problems.
I'd like to see it stay this way. Every time we move forward to create legislation to protect the end user (see CAN-SPAM and a myriad of other laws), we see failure time and again. The loopholes in the laws make them irrelevant quickly, and all we get out of that is wasted money and wasted time.
Let the growth and expansion occur freely. We'll see some bad times (new viruses and new spam exploits) but we'll see those fixed in short order. If they don't get fixed, why is the Internet still chugging along and growing every day?
This XSS problem is serious because Google cookies persist for about 2 weeks. You should think a bit before posting bullshit!
Does anyone have the real post that hasn't been mangled by the mailing list? What are these characters that they used? Does anyone have a working exploit of this type (encoded xss) on another site?
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
You must be new here.
"How common are XSS holes?"
I had to laugh at that one.
Only an XSShole would steal your cookies.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I have and it's not serious. At best it's a medium risk. It's not like you can exploit the XSS vul without any user intervention. You still have to get the user to go to the malicious URL. That immediately says to me, 'not serious'. But I guess you're down with infosec marketing propaganda.
Do you work for Watchfire by chance?
Someone is trying to get their Pagerank up by submitting the story with a name of "Security Test" and linking to their shoddy website. The site has only a few links, no content, and it says the page is for sale. Will slashdot ever get their shit together and stop posting submissions with blatent pagerank-whoring links like this?
This is reported as a Google.com bug, which is partially true. But this is only one half of the problem. The other half of the problem (mentioned in the full article) is due to a dubious feature in Internet Explorer: when it gets a page without a specified character encoding, it does not rely on default values for the encoding (which should be iso-8859-1 for HTML or UTF-8 for XHTML).
Instead, Internet Exploerer tries to guess the encoding of the contents by looking at the first 4096 bytes of the page and checking the non-ASCII characters. In the case of the cross-site scripting attack decribed here, the problem is that IE would silently set the encoding of a page to UTF-7 in case some characters in the first 4096 bytes looked like UTF-7. This silent conversion to UTF-7 by Internet Explorer in a text that Google assumed to use the default encoding allowed the attackers to bypass the way Google was filtering "dangerous" characters in some URLs.
The article puts the full blame for the vulnerability on Google.com. I think that a part of the blame should also be shared by the Internet Explorer designers (and any other browser that does unexpected things while trying to guess what the user "really meant").
By fixing this bug, everybody is save from it. No one needs to keep their software up to date, great!
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
They can even go to multiple problems at the same time. If this problem were more prevelant, a hacker could craft a page that steals ALL your online logins/cookies/etc from any site that had the problem. They would just need to craft a page with multiple framesets that load up all the vunlerable pages.
XSS is also making news because it's being used by phishers to forge stuff from the target domain. All the anti phishing stuff relies on which domain a link is going to.. but in a sense, XSS allows phishers to put their own page (ie. fake login) on the target domain! It is very much a problem for any site that deals with personal information, or has trusted content.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
..... seems to be very good. They acknowledged the problem quickly (the same day if I recall correctly) and fixed it within days. Maybe instead of treating this posting as if there is a bug out there that is a clear and present danger, perhaps we should be talking about how good their response was and why other software companies aren't as responsive?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Web applications are like wicker furniture and fat women - meant to be broken by Jonny Fairplay!
I don't work at all dude!
I discovered flaws in all of the above mentioned, that are still unresolved. I actually managed to get a phone call out of amazon but the person on the other end didn't seem to care much.
Most of them were http response splitting attacks, but some others too.
Ive found that google, symantec and cnet have been great companies to help out. They all provided quick responses and even resolved issues as soon as possible in the past with me.
Though, even with the high shopping time right now, ebay and amazon could bother less. Paypal, barely lets you even email a rep without having to go through tons of form filling.
If anyone has any contacts with any of these organization and can possibly get someone to talk to me about them I can be contacted at admin@dbtech.org
Thanks.
While it may be one thing to pull apart IE and Windows XP (they can be done remotely, in an unconnected lab, with zero impact to a larger community), where does one acquire the balls to go and tinker with a hugely popular online site like google, where the mere act of investigation -may- impact the operational stability of the site.
Now, I know that XSS is benign but whose to say that there wouldn't be some ping-of-death like characteristic with a bizarre UTF-7 encoding? While it's doubtful that google would have such poor quality in their applications, why does the white-hat security community get carte blanche access to test it out?
I could be bitter because I sent a similar email to google (regarding their gmail login account and the 'continue=' varaiable) in March but never heard a reply. But to google's credit, and my defense, I only indicated that it looked highly suspicious and never took the next step to craft an actual attack and send them the code.
If a security engineer should happen across the logs and start to see a bunch of unusual encodings, or what appears to be a recon of the website's characteristics, what level of forgiveness would be applied if the source of such network activity was from eEye, or Watchfire? And what if it was bankofamerica.com instead of google?
I am all for giving vendors a reasonable amount of time to fix a defect and then provide full disclosure but I'm not keen to keep paying for watchfire (eEye, iss, etc..) to go to school and get free press based on unauthorized accesses to my production systems - where is the balance?
How is letting people search through texts of books evil? I say it sounds more like what Gutenburg did with writing, liberate it with the printing press.
And if they want to buy AOL that is their business. Google isn't a charity, they still need to be profitable.
The bigger you are the bigger a target you are for all the shit slingers.
I don't know if it's related, but I've noticed a couple of times that when I get the search result page, I get asked to set a cookie from one of the sites in the results, without clicking on them. (my Firefox is configured to ask me to set cookies.). This is somewhat disturbing, I mean if my FF was set to accept cookies automatically, I would have cookies for sites I have never visited...
Did anyone else notice this?
Here we go again!
retard
-=+=-=+=-=+=-=+=-
following my instincts not a trend...
It seems odd to blame this on Google. According to the linked mailing list posting, the problem is caused by the "auto detect character set" feature in IE (and probably other browsers,) and the lack of a "charset" parameter in the HTTP response from Google. The HTTP spec is pretty clear that a missing charset parameter means ISO-8859-1, not "browser should guess", and certainly not UTF-7.
So isn't it really the "auto detect" feature in the browser that causes the vulnerability, and not Google's lack of "charset encoding enforcement" as the mailing list posting from Watchfire Research claims? Let's put the blame where it belongs. I say we should applaud Google for going the extra kilometer to protect users with non-compliant browsers.
Agree with the grandparent, but still an interesting point. This aspect is probably the most pertinent topic related to this story. You could say this makes a case not simply for web-apps but for centrally hosted web services and APIs. (Like the Google Maps API, for example)
> retard
Or shall we say tarded again?
I'm not saying it's a technical challenge. I'm saying that the impact is dramatically reduced by having to take that step verus something like an XSS vul in the GMail interface which could be exploited by a malicious email.
none of those qualify as XSS. The javascript in the first example must be entered by the USER, it can't be done by a third party. While they should filter this input, it's not a security hole. Allowing yourself to run JS on any site in your own browser is not a security hole (in fact, it's easy to do). It's only a problem when it can be done by someone else.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
the problem with irony is that it is often too subtle.
And then what happens to AJAX?
I dunno... a bunch of empty-headed hype men will have to find a new buzzword to latch onto?
It's just a thought.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
absolutely... biggest category -> middle category -> most restrictive category is good, going the other directions makes no sense at all
You might find this explanation helpful: http://shiflett.org/archive/177
All posts from slashdot uids less than 10,000 are automatically moderated as informative, interesting, or funny.
Yeah, you and RFC 3339 (and their dog).
What a buzz for nothing ... ....
and a LATE nothing
------
GavrocheLeGnou
Flash Socket Server For Xml Communication
12/01/2005
No offence but i think that this US format is plain stupid... really...
Is that 12 of january or 1 of december? its a format that have several possible intepretations and without any logic (middle time scale/low/high !?!)
I can understand very well the 2005/12/01 and the 01/12/2005 (i prefer the first, specially in computers, but last is better for reading on paper) but the mixed US format is wierd and dangerous...
Most of the time looks like you must guess the correct date.
so why dont the US kill this stupid format?
Higuita
Oh, for pete's sake...
I think the 90% of the world that doesn't like obsessing with security would disagree with you about lassez-faire and how well it is handling identity theft and other criminal conduct that has exploded thanks to the internet. My dad *deserves* legal protections from phishing attacks (a specific example: banks should be required to guarantee client accounts... that is WHAT A BANK IS!!!). And a small business should have their online transactions safe from remote fraud (with banks again being held responsible for THEIR end of any fraudulent transaction). Doing so means legally-defined minimum standards and coverages for financial institutions.
You're quick to claim that all regulatory activity is a failure, but using your same (flawed) reasoning, technological remedies have also failed to 'solve' ID theft, viruses, trojans, spam, keyloggers, hacking, international abuses, and so on. These problems all remain, and they need a blend of tech and legal remedies. Tech wherever possible, legal to make sure that it is never cheaper/easier to deny or whitewash an expensive problem.
We outgrew that silly business-will-self-regulate oversimplification with Love Canal and DDT, if not with child labor. Online crime is huge and growing rapidly. People's lives are being harmed. And the single biggest cause is that easy-and-unsafe technological setups are not being held accountable for damages. Time and again, the market has proven unable to accomodate safety concerns: they are ignored in a race toward the bottom line. Whether we're talking about child labor, environmental protections, social security or online fraud, the market regrettably lacks this ability. The only difference here is that it is harder to directly KILL people via online crime. Because the market seems unwilling and unable to self-correct, tech remedies alone won't solve things. Culpability and minimum standards are needed to force all businesses to work at a minimum standard of protection.
You're wrong here because you overreach. Both tech and legal remedies fail alone because of what they're up against: a rapidly-changing landscape of attacks and remedies.
Tech innovation is incredibly powerful. For example, as much as I hate DRM, it at least improves the aggressive segmentation of data and code, strengthens authentication (itself a two-edged sword), and gets the problem back out of joe-user's lap. And that is exactly WHERE the problem needs to not be: producers should have minimum standards of quality and be held liable whenever they undercut these minimum standards. The argument worth holding is about the threshold required, not about whether public interests are served by having legal minimum standards.
(Really, dada, it seems like every free-market crank message I see lately is written by you. Went to Foe you a week ago and found you ALREADY are on my foes list. This is finally a flaw with mitigating my slash-addiction with alterslash.org: it can't realign you into the permanent-troll status you deserve.)
He's in Israel but still it looks nice in US format.
Other than that - kill this stupid format. YYYY-MM-DD or stating month names is the way to go to avoid this stupidity.
and say you did so because said companies were unresponsive or impossible to reach in a realistic manner.
Flaw will get fixed ASAP and company will have egg on face.
Its better that you do it this way NOW than waiting for a bad guy to use the flaw to his advantage, not tell anyone about the flaw, and fuck up things royally for people before it is figured out and fixed.
Or was it northern america???
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
I think the 90% of the world that doesn't like obsessing with security would disagree with you about lassez-faire and how well it is handling identity theft and other criminal conduct that has exploded thanks to the internet. My dad *deserves* legal protections from phishing attacks (a specific example: banks should be required to guarantee client accounts... that is WHAT A BANK IS!!!). And a small business should have their online transactions safe from remote fraud (with banks again being held responsible for THEIR end of any fraudulent transaction). Doing so means legally-defined minimum standards and coverages for financial institutions.
Actually, a bank is there to store your valuable money, and that's all it is to do. A mortgage company is for home loans, a personal line of credit company is for credit cards. Banks just store money -- they used to store your gold very safely and give you a note guaranteeing you that gold -- it was called a dollar bill. Banks do not have to guarantee you anything, in fact, in a free market, banks that didn't guarantee you safety would not last as people would put their money in safe banks. Don't ask laws to give you what you can have for the asking.
You're quick to claim that all regulatory activity is a failure, but using your same (flawed) reasoning, technological remedies have also failed to 'solve' ID theft, viruses, trojans, spam, keyloggers, hacking, international abuses, and so on. These problems all remain, and they need a blend of tech and legal remedies. Tech wherever possible, legal to make sure that it is never cheaper/easier to deny or whitewash an expensive problem.
Interesting. I don't use my ID -- ever. I don't use my social security number except when I take payments from a customer and need to fill out a 1099. I don't bank, so I don't worry about banks. I don't have credit cards anymore. Why would I worry about identity theft? Everyone that knows me, KNOWS ME. Viruses are solved -- I haven't had one in years. Anyone who gets a virus is to blame, not the virus. Spam, all that? I don't get it either. My public e-mail address here got 2 spam messages last week, and I post my e-mail address for all to see!
We outgrew that silly business-will-self-regulate oversimplification with Love Canal and DDT, if not with child labor.
I'm glad I'm on your foe list, because you speak nonsense, seriously. I don't mean to write any flamebait, but Love Canal was proven a government problem, not a corporate one. The government you so loved made the problem what it is. In fact, in the media publications of the time before the disasters, many companies were warning the school board not to build there. Your government did it, not any big bad corporation.
As for DDT, this is another greenie myth. You might have "learned" some scary myths in your pro-environment rally or in your public school, but it's all just myths.
Don't spew authoritarian rhetoric if you're against my anti-authoritarian rhetoric. We'll just both flag each other -5 and be done with it. I personally like hearing debates against my opinions, but not when it is the same proven MYTHS over and over and over for the last decade. Come up with new things to find false, will you?
Agreed on javascript...
: ntcompatible.com/article1.html+%22Alexander+Peter+ Kowalski%22&hl=en
And, unfortunately so, it gets abused here & there, but in places you would NOT expect... like in malicious adbanners on sites as well!
I've been writing to TURN JAVASCRIPT OFF IN YOUR WEBBROWSER since the mid-90's in fact, first here (as article #1 from NTCompatible.com illustrated & I put it up for speed & security optimizations to your OS & apps there in 1997 first):
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:BWFk5yhHJhYJ
And, more currently (far more thorough article, it started from that one's foundations) here:
http://www.avatar.demon.nl/APK.html
For Windows NT-based OS (2000/XP/Server 2003) users - it ALL just works for better security (and speed) of your overall PC operations...
APK
P.S.=> Like yourself? I "saw it coming"... sometimes, you can just tell that potentially good things will get abused! It's for the overall good though imo, I will take the 'high road' on that because it allows the developers to study the flaw, & hopefully fix it, in whatever type of software it is out there that gets a hole found in it, or a potential one... apk
You're quick to claim that all regulatory activity is a failure, but using your same (flawed) reasoning, technological remedies have also failed to 'solve' ID theft, viruses, trojans, spam, keyloggers, hacking, international abuses, and so on.
Yes, clearly the unregulated (or minimally regulated) Internet has proven vastly inferior to the legally enforced areas like theft, rape, assault, and murder. It turns out that market forces don't eliminate 100% of problems, whereas clearly government regulation does.
Or, if we drop the sarcasm and extreme oversimplification, we discover that both the mostly lassez-faire world of Internet commerce and the mostly government handled law-enforcement and personal safety realms fail to solve their problems 100%. Yes, viruses exist. This doesn't mean that tech security is a failure.
Up until the big news virus/worm epidemics a year or two back (Blaster, Nachi, Sasser, MyDoom, etc) viruses and worms weren't really that big of a problem. Yes, they existed, yes they infected a couple computers. But that wasn't a big enough problem to justify spending lots of money addressing those issues.
After the big news problems hit, companies started taking computer security more seriously, without govermnent regulation having to tell them to. The very large goverment organization where I work established a Chief Security Officer position and a whole department that hadn't been there before. Even Microsoft started massive pushes to hire better security-conscious programmers and prioritize security. Yes, it will take a while for these things to bear fruit, but large government programs don't move any faster than private ones.
Neither extreme is perfect. Free market security behaviors don't completely eliminate viruses and worms and identity theft, just as government law enforcement doesn't completely eliminate crime. But both approaches do quite well, and as dada points out, the self-instituted corporate responses to computer security flaws have been quite impressive. The number of zero-day exploits remains small. Recent studies show that the vast majority of identity theft never leads to any actual harm. I don't think goverment regulation would significantly improve this area, and would perhaps make it worse.
That doesn't mean that the complete lassez-faire approach solves all problems, but a mostly lassez-faire approach does mostly solve some problems, and it appears that this is one of them.