Code Nuances (or Bypassing XSS Filters) : Centralops.net Case Study

It is always fun to play around with deployed security mechanisms that are used for subverting application layer attacks. It is much more interesting to target applications enabled with protections (or that throw code nuances)  rather attacking protection-free applications. A simple case study of centralops.net is presented below.

Acknowledgement: I would like to thank Gavin from Hexillion Group (http://hexillion.com/) for patching this issue within few hours.

Case Study: Recently working on a domain dossier (http:///www.centralops.net) website for my ongoing research, I came across with interesting scenario where I have to bypass some glitches in the code (or filter) to execute the XSS code. I wanted to perform link injection with payload :

"/>&<a href="http://0x.lv/xss.swf"> Injecting SWF Payload </a>

Error due to Injection !

The error I encountered was: "has multiple items separated by spaces, but only one input is allowed at a time. Domain Dossier will continue with"

The error clearly indicates that the input has to be provided as one value. It means the injection payload has to be pushed as one value. I tried a number of payloads with different meta characters which resulted in same responses until I found the XSS payload that bypassed everything in this scenario.  I played around with the white spaces and tried to remove them with certain characters that allowed me to execute the JavaScript (one can find more payloads but depending on the time, I was satisfied with that because the bypass was done already). Overall it was a game play for 10 minutes.

Original : "/><a href="http://0x.lv/xss.swf"> Injecting SWF Payload </a>
Bypass: "/><a//href="http://0x.lv/xss.swf">Injecting_SWF_Payload</a>
Bypass: "/><a/href="http://0x.lv/xss.swf">Injecting_SWF_Payload</a>

Note: I used "/", "//" and "_" characters to treat the payload as one value and pushed it. As a result injection occurs as follows:

Successful Rendering of XSS Payload !

 The supplied payload resulted in successful XSS injection in the target application.

Successful Execution of Payload !

What do we learn from this?
During past years, I feel its more important to understand how exactly the attack is executed (analyzing the underlying components) . As per my experience, one attack vector might not work in all target environments, so we have to build a new one every time. In a number of earlier scenarios, I have seen that if we tamper the whitespaces between HTML attributes and tags, the code fails to render properly in the application. But, in this case study, we are required to embed additional characters in the payload for passing the payload as one value to the application.

Inference: 

(1) Understand the error and develop appropriate combinations to overcome nuances (or bypass XSS filters).
(2) Design XSS payload as per target environment.

Enjoy !