DOMPurify: Client-Side Protection Against XSS and Markup Injection

Mario Heiderich, Christopher Späth, Jörg Schwenk

(2017, September). DOMPurify: Client-Side Protection Against XSS and Markup Injection. In European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS), Springer, Cham.


Abstract

To prevent Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and related attacks, sanitation of untrusted content is usually performed either on the server side, or by client-side filters like XSS Auditor or NoScript. However, modern web applications (including mobile apps) may not be able to rely on these mechanisms any more since untrusted content may pass these filters as ciphertext or may completely be processed within the DOM of the browser/app.

To cope with this problem, XSS sanitation within the Document Object Model (DOM) is required. This poses a novel technical challenge: A DOM-based sanitizer must rely on native JavaScript functions. However, in the DOM, any function or property can be overwritten, through a class of attacks called DOM Clobbering.

We present a two-part solution: First we show how to embed any server or client side filtering technology securely into the DOM. Second, we give an example instantiation of an XSS filter which is highly efficient when implemented in Javascript. Both parts are combined into a working and battle-tested proof-of-concept implementation called DOMPurify.

Tags: