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I'm pentesting a website that has a reflected XSS, or at least a vector for a reflection, but the issue is the following :

  • It escapes <, >, " to their HTML entities, but not &, ) or (.
  • You are not in a tag, so you have to create your own.

It's not the first time that I see implementations of this sort. Express.js has this by default for example. Are implementations like these safe from XSS?

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    Where exactly is it reflected? I.e. is it inside an attribute or text node or script tags, or style, etc..? – valentinas Dec 11 '13 at 1:08
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    I believe this is well documented. – rook Dec 11 '13 at 1:08
  • In addition to other answers, also see this about "mXSS attacks": reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/1skr62/… – domen Dec 11 '13 at 13:38
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No, that's not necessarily sufficient. There are many XSS vectors that can potentially still be applied, depending upon where the injection point is.

Some examples:

  • Injection into unquoted attribute values

  • Injection into attribute values quoted with a single quote (' instead of ")

  • Injection into CSS

  • Injection into Javascript

  • Injection into comments

... and lots more. You need to do context-sensitive escaping, and you definitely need to escape at minimum <, >, ", ', plus some more in some contexts. Go spend some time on the OWASP site; there's tons written there, and this is explained in great detail.

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  • +1 (While you are right, I do not see where an escaped > would allow getting out of an HTML comment.) – freddyb Dec 11 '13 at 15:36
  • @freddyb, yeah, it's tricky. For comments, the key character is -, which has an interesting effect inside HTML comments (most people don't know about the surprising behavior of HTML/SGML comments). Such attacks are not easy and probably only possible in rare circumstances, but it's better to not inject dynamic values inside comments. – D.W. Dec 11 '13 at 19:53
  • I fully agree. Do you have any weird findings with regard to comments though? – freddyb Dec 15 '13 at 12:13
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sometimes they escape "alert " parameter too, then you can use something like "onMouseOver" etc and you can find the full link here. https://www.owasp.org/index.php/XSS_Filter_Evasion_Cheat_Sheet (try xss locators)

moreover you can use %3C insead of < and so on... try url encoding etc.

and if the text is encoded in the background, you xss may not work...

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