Monday, November 28, 2011

Evading Content Security Policy With CRLF Injection

Content Security Policy (CSP) was developed with the aim of reducing content injection attacks like Cross Site Scripting. CSP allows the developers to specify the permitted content sources for their web applications and relies on HTTP response headers to enforce content restrictions.

When CSP is implemented by the web application and supported by the web browser, content injection attacks can be performed by:

  1. Exploiting flaws in browser CSP implementation
  2. Manipulating HTTP response headers.

CRLF injection is one possible technique by which an attacker can control HTTP response headers. If client provided parameters are returned in response headers without any validation, CRLF injection can be used to bypass CSP restrictions.

For demonstrations, two web pages were setup with the following content at two different origins
Webpage 1: http://localhost:3000/csp
Content:
http://localhost:3333/xss.js

Webpage 2: http://localhost:3333/xss.js
Content:
alert('XSS’)


CRLF Injection and CSP:
If a HTTP response contains same HTTP header multiple times, different browsers interpret the headers  differently. Certain browsers interpret the first occurrence of the HTTP header, others choose the last one. Hence, positioning of CSP directive (X-Content-Security-Policy) in application response can play an interesting role. In the discussion below, we assume that the web application implements CSP and is vulnerable to CRLF injection:

Case 1: Attack vector is returned before the CSP header in the HTTP response headers:
Case 1a: If the browser picks the first occurrence of the CSP header, CRLF injection can then be used to insert a CSP header with following attack vector:

lang=en_US%0d%0aX-Content-Security-Policy: allow *

In this case, the web browser will interpret the first CSP header and will happily retrieve content from any malicious URL.

Image shows malicious CSP directive inserted before the legitimate header 

Case 1b: If the browser picks the last occurrence of the CSP header, following CRLF injection attack vector can be used to insert custom CSP header.

lang=en_US%0d%0aX-Content-Security-Policy: allow *%0d%0a%0d%0a

Two trailing occurrences of CRLF will push the CSP directive into the content and will not be interpreted as a CSP directive. This again allows attacker to bypass CSP protection and execute and source arbitrary content.


Image shows CSP directive pushed out to response body and rendered ineffective 

Case 2: Attack vector is returned after the CSP header in the HTTP response headers
Case 2a: If the browser picks the first occurrence of the CSP header, the CSP directive cannot be overridden for the current resource. For an attack to function one has to look into the possibility of exploiting HTTP Response Splitting.

Case 2b: If the browser picks the last occurrence of the CSP header, CRLF injection can be used to insert a malicious header similar to case 1a.

lang=en_US%0d%0aX-Content-Security-Policy: allow *

This will cause the browser to interpret the CSP directive as allow * to retrieve content from arbitrary URLs.

It was observed that when more than one X-Content-Security-Policy headers were received by Firefox (7.0.1), it securely defaulted to same origin policy for all content.

The POC below pushes the headers out to the response body by two CRLF sequences to achieve script execution.

Image shows script execution prevented from a different origin (http://localhost:3333)
Image shows successful script execution when the page was vulnerable CRLF injection


Thursday, November 17, 2011

CAPTCHA Hax With TesserCap

This blog post was voted as 8th best in Top 10 Web Hacking Techniques of 2011 poll.

With the goal of creating a tool that can help security professionals and developers to test their CAPTCHA schemes, I conducted a research on over 200 high traffic websites and several CAPTCHA service providers listed on Quantcast’s Top 1 Million Ranking Websites.

During the same time frame, students at the Stanford University also conducted a similar research (PDF). Both research works concluded the obvious:

An alarming number of CAPTCHAs schemes are vulnerable to automated attacks.

I looked around, tested and zeroed in on Tesseract-OCR as my OCR engine. To remove color complexities, spatial irregularities, and other types of random noise from CAPTCHAs, I decided to write my own image preprocessing engine. After a few months of research, coding and testing in my spare time, TesserCap was born and is ready for release now.

TesserCap is a GUI based, point and shoot CAPTCHA analysis tool with the following features:
  1. A generic image preprocessing engine that can be configured as per the CAPTCHA type being analyzed.
  2. Tesseract-OCR as its OCR engine to retrieve text from preprocessed CAPTCHAs.
  3. Web proxy support
  4. Support for custom HTTP headers to retrieve CAPTCHAs from websites that require cookies or special HTTP headers in requests
  5. CAPTCHA statistical analysis support
  6. Character set selection for the OCR Engine
An example TesserCap image preprocessing and run on Wikipedia (Wikimedia’s Fancy CAPTCHA) is shown below:



Downloads

TesserCap and it's user manual can be downloaded from one of the following locations:

Results

The two tables below summarize the CAPTCHA analysis performed using TesserCap for few popular websites and some CAPTCHA service providers. All these tests were performed using TesserCap’s image preprocessing module and Tesseract-OCR’s default training data.







Website Accuracy* Quantcast Rank
wikipedia 20-30% 7
ebay 20-30% 11
reddit.com 20-30% 68
CNBC 50+% 121
foodnetwork.com 80-90% 160
dailymail.co.uk 30+% 245
megaupload.com 80+% 1000
pastebin.com 70-80% 32,534
cavenue.com 80+% 149,645




CAPTCHA Provider Accuracy*
captchas.net 40-50%
opencaptcha.com 20-30%
snaphost.com 60+%
captchacreator.com 10-20%
www.phpcaptcha.org 10-20%
webspamprotect.com 40+%
ReCaptcha 0%



*This accuracy maybe further increased by training the Tesseract-OCR engine for the CAPTCHAs under test.

Wikipedia






OpenCaptcha Preprocessing






OpenCaptcha Sample Run




Reddit




eBay