CRV2 ContextEncHTMLAttribute

HTML Attribute Encoding: HTML attributes may contain untrusted data. It is important to determine if any ot the HTML attribites on a given page contains data from outside the trust boundary.

Some HTML attributes are considered safeer than others such as

align, alink, alt, bgcolor, border, cellpadding, cellspacing, class, color, cols, colspan, coords, dir, face, height, hspace, ismap, lang, marginheight, marginwidth, multiple, nohref, noresize, noshade, nowrap, ref, rel, rev, rows, rowspan, scrolling, shape, span, summary, tabindex, title, usemap, valign, value, vlink, vspace, width

when reviewing code for XSS we need to look for HTML attributes such as the folloiwng



Attacks may take the following format: "> /* bad stuff */

What is Attribute encoding? HTML attribute encoding replaces a subset of characters that are important to prevent a string of characters from breaking the attribute of an HTML element. We replace ", &, and < with &quot;, &amp;, and &gt;. This is because the nature of attributes, the data they contain, and how they are parsed and interpreted by a browser or HTML parser is different than how an HTML document and its elements are read.

[XSS Prevention CheatSheet]: Except for alphanumeric characters, escape all characters with ASCII values less than 256 with the &#xHH; format (or a named entity if available) to prevent switching out of the attribute. The reason this rule is so broad is that developers frequently leave attributes unquoted. Properly quoted attributes can only be escaped with the corresponding quote. Unquoted attributes can be broken out of with many characters, including [space] % * +, - / ; < = > ^ and |.

Attribute encoding may be perfromed in a number of ways. HttpUtility.HtmlAttributeEncode http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wdek0zbf.aspx

OWASP Java Encoder Project OWASP Java Encoder Project https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Java_Encoder_Project