Information Security Tutorial

What XSS

‘XSS’ also known as ‘CSS’ – Cross Site Scripting. It is a very common vulnerability
found in Web Applications, ‘XSS’ allows the attacker to INSERT malicous code,

There are many types of XSS attacks, I will mention 3 of the most used. This kind of vulnerability allows an “attacker” to inject some code into the applications affected in order to bypass access to the website or to apply “phishing” on falls users.
This technique is also used for website Hacking.

Types of XSS:
There are actually three types of Cross-Site Scripting, commonly named as:

Related Articles
  1. DOM-Based XSS
  2. Non-persistent XSS
  3. Persistent XSS

DOM-Based : The DOM-Based Cross-Site Scripting allow to an attacker to work not on a victim website but on a victim local machine: the various operative system usually includes “since born” some HTML pages created for differents aims, but as long as the humans do mistakes this HTML pages often can be exploited due to code vulnerabilities.

The DOM-Based XSS exploits these problems on users local machines in this way:
– The attacker creates a well builded malicious website
– The ingenuous user opens that site
– The user has a vulnerable page on his machine
– The attacker’s website sends commands to the vulnerable HTML page
– The vulnerable local page execute that commands with the user’s privileges
on that machine.
– The attacker easily gain control on the victim computer.

Non-Persistent : The non-persistent XSS are actually the most commons vulnerabilities that can be found on the Net. It’s commonly named as “non-persistent” because it works on an immediate HTTP response from the victim website: it show up when the webpage get the data provided by the attacker’s client to automatically generate a result page for the attackers himself. Standing on this the attacker could provide some malicious code and try to make the server execute it in order to obtain some result.

The most common applying of this kind of vulnerability is in Search engines in website: the attacker writes some arbitrary HTML code in the search textbox and, if the website
is vulnerable, the result page will return the result of these HTML entities.

Persistent : The persistent XSS vulnerabilities are similar to the second type (Non-persistent XSS), because both works on a victim site and tries to hack users informations and the difference is that in websites vulnerables to Persistent XSS the attacker doesn’t need to
provide the crafted url to the users, because the website itself permits to users to insert fixed data into the system: this is the case for example of “guestbooks”. Usually the users uses
that kind of tool to leave messages to the owned
of the website and at a first look it doesn’t seems something dangerous, but if an
attacker discover that the system is vulnerable can insert some malicious code in his
message and let ALL visitors to be victim of that.

This works when the tool provided (the guestbook in the example) doesn’t do any
check on the content of the inserted message: it just inserts the data provided from
the user into the result page.

Mustapha Haouili

Software development engineer - It System Administrator with a successful experience from 14 years. Programming languages: Cobol - C# - Python - Shell Script. There is no problem without a solution

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