When Microsoft unveiled its IE 8's "XSS filters", almost one year ago, we could notice how, despite their impressive resemblance to NoScript's anti-XSS protection, they were quite limited in comparison.
One of the limitations was their ability to mitigate a subset of reflective (AKA type 1) XSS vulnerabilities only, leaving them totally useless against DOM-based (AKA type 0) XSS attacks which, instead, are effectively defeated by NoScript.
Today I noticed via sla.ckers.org that such a DOM-based XSS attack is currently possible against Paypal and Ebay, no less, allowing the attacker to steal authentication info and other sensitive data, or even perform financial transactions on the behalf of the victim.
Even more interesting, modern browsers* except IE properly encode request URLs before sending them on the wire, but exploitation of this specific Paypal vulnerability requires the "double quotes" character to pass through with no encoding: therefore, while the vast majority of XSS exploits are cross-browser, this one affects exclusively IE**. Embrace and XSStend?
- * Latest versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome.
- ** Variants could affect any browser, since IE's encoding bug is generally not required for DOM-based XSS. Firefox users can protect themselves by using NoScript, even in the permissive and not recommended "Allow Scripts Globally" mode.