What is Cross Side Scripting (XSS)?

A Web application vulnerable to XSS allows a user to inadvertently send malicious data to self through that application.

Attackers often perform XSS exploitation by crafting malicious URLs and tricking users into clicking on them.

These links cause client side scripting languages )VBScript, JavaScript etc,) of the attacker s choice to execute on the victim's browser.

XSS vulnerabilities are caused by a failure in the web application to properly validate user input.

The simplest description of cross-site scripting can be put as the attack that occurs when a user enters malicious data in a Web site. It can be as simple as posting a message that contains malicious code to a newsgroup. When another person views this message, the browser will interpret the code and execute it, often giving the attacker control of the system. Malicious scripts can also be executed automatically based on certain events, such as when a picture loads. Unlike most security vulnerabilities, CSS doesn't apply to any single vendor's products - instead, it can affect any software that runs on a web server

CSS takes place as a result of the failure of the web based application to validate user supplied input, before returning it to the client system. "Cross-Site" refers to the security restrictions that the client browser usually places on data (i.e. cookies, dynamic content attributes, etc.) associated with a web site. By causing the victim's browser to execute malicious code with the same permissions as the domain of the web application, an attacker can bypass the traditional document object model (DOM) security restrictions. The document object model is accessible application interface that allows client-side languages to dynamically access and modify the content, structure and style of a web page.

Cross-Site Scripting (CSS) attacks require the execution of Client-Side Languages (JavaScript, Java, VBScript, ActiveX, Flash, etc.) within a user's web environment. Cross Site Scripting can result in an attacker stealing cookies, hijacking sessions, changing of web application account settings etc. The most common web components that are vulnerable to CSS attacks include CGI scripts, search engines, interactive bulletin boards, and custom error pages with poorly written input validation routines. Moreover, a victim does not necessarily have to click on a link to make the attack possible.

XSS Countermeasures

• As a web application user, there are a few ways to protect yourselves from XSS attacks.

• The first and the most effective solution is to disable all scripting language support in your browser and email reader.

• If this is not a feasible option for business reasons, another recommendation is to use reasonable caution while clicking links in anonymous e-mails and dubious web pages.

• Proxy servers can help filter out malicious scripting in HTML.

  Preventing cross-site scripting is a challenging task especially for large distributed web applications. If the application accepts only expected input, then the XSS can be significantly reduced.

  Web servers should set the character set, and then make sure that the data they insert is free from byte sequences that are special in the specified encoding. This can typically be done by settings in the application server or web server. The server should define the character set in each html page as below.

  Web pages with unspecified character-encoding work mostly because most character sets assign the same characters to byte values below 128. Some 16-bit character-encoding schemes have additional multi-byte representations for special characters such as "<. These should be checked.