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Cross Site Scripting (XSS) issues when using URL Queries that are shown in the address field

Thread began 9/16/2020 11:10 am by Steve | Last modified 9/16/2020 12:52 pm by Ray Borduin | 283 views | 4 replies |

Steve

Cross Site Scripting (XSS) issues when using URL Queries that are shown in the address field

I have a client that is getting flagged as having XSS vulnerabilities on their site.
For instance we have a generic page that uses the URL string as a value in the page. These are Cities and allow a number of pages to have some SEO benefit without having to write Content for each city.

Example:
https://www.savonhomes.com/cities.php?id=Riverside

But this string will also allow html tags such as :
https://www.savonhomes.com/cities.php?id=<h1>Riverside</h1>

This show that "tags" can be used in the page and is being flagged as an XSS vulnerability.

Personally I don't see how this could be a problem other than our client getting notices from companies that want to solve this condition.

Should I sanitize the URL parameter input prior to using in the page or is it best practice to disallow the page to render IF a certain characters are present (<> etc)?

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Ray BorduinWebAssist

Cross site scripting can be used in conjunction with iframes to steal cookies. The stolen cookies could be used to hijack sessions. Now, that may or may not be a big issue depending on what sensitive information your site may or may not contain about users.

In general, I would close XSS vulnerabilities... You can do that by using htmlspecialchars() to encode any potentially offending code before writing it to the page like:

php:
<?php echo(htmlspecialchars($_GET["id"])); ?>
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Steve

Thank you Ray. As always you are an invaluable resource to the community.

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Steve

Actually I did not see merit in htmlspecialchars but found the strip_tags() function to remove all tags which seems effective in leaving only text in the URL parameter.

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Ray BorduinWebAssist

strip_tags() removes tags but won't encode quotes or even > characters outside of tags, which can be used to break out of tag or script blocks where the GET variable is referenced.

strip_tags may be enough in your application, but htmlspecialchars() is the more complete blocker for XSS attacks in all situations where they may occur.

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