Subverting AJAX

In a world where the user learned to behave properly in his interaction with the old web interfaces, many innovative technologies are emerging. Ajax and new dynamic web extensions empower web browsers and client-server communications as well as they leverage new threats and undisclosed attack scenarious. Web 2.0 is going to be the first choice in upcoming web projects and many companies are migrating to new dynamic front-ends to increment value to their institutional sites, intranet corporates and Online Banking portals. After a quick overview of simple Cross Site Scripting attacks, the speech will focus on security aspects of Web 2.0 technologies exploring unconventional and undisclosed attacking techniques. During the presentation we will show the next step in content/request hijacking and the next generation of client-side and server-side injection. Specifically, by applying advanced Javascript techniques like prototyping we'll see how to hijack functions and objects in order to have transparent attacks without breaking javascript code in Ajax web pages. Moreover, will be shown non trivial ways to attack web pages and inject code by taking advantage of other kinds of vulnerabilities in a cross domain environment. Finally, we will see how poor design choices in web browsers would bring to new kind of attacking vectors like UXSS through plugins and sandbox framework flaws.