Abusing Browser Address Bar for Fun and Profit - An Empirical Investigation of Add-On Cross Site Scripting Attacks Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2015. Add-on JavaScript originating from users inputs to the browser brings new functionalities such as debugging and entertainment, however it also leads to a new type of cross-site scripting attack (defined as add-on XSS by us), which consists of two parts: a snippet of JavaScript in clear text, and a spamming sentence enticing benign users to input the previous JavaScript. In this paper, we focus on the most common add-on XSS, the one caused by browser address bar JavaScript. To measure the severity, we conduct three experiments: (i) analysis on real-world traces from two large social networks, (ii) a user study by means of recruiting Amazon Mechanical Turks [4], and (iii) a Facebook experiment with a fake account. We believe as the first systematic and scientific study, our paper can ring a bell for all the browser vendors and shed a light for future researchers to find an appropriate solution for add-on XSS.

published proceedings

  • INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SECURITY AND PRIVACY IN COMMUNICATION NETWORKS, SECURECOMM 2014, PT I

author list (cited authors)

  • Cao, Y., Yang, C., Rastogi, V., Chen, Y., & Gu, G.

citation count

  • 0

complete list of authors

  • Cao, Yinzhi||Yang, Chao||Rastogi, Vaibhav||Chen, Yan||Gu, Guofei

publication date

  • January 2015