Scripted Henchmen: Leveraging XS-Leaks for Cross-Site Vulnerability Detection

Abstract

The key security principle that browsers adhere to, such as the same-origin policy and site isolation, ensure that when visiting a potentially untrusted website, the web page is loaded in an isolated environment. These security measures aim to prevent a malicious site from extracting information about cross-origin resources. However, in recent years, several techniques have been discovered that leak potentially sensitive information from responses sent by other sites. In this paper, we show that these XSLeaks can be used to force an unwitting visitor to detect prevalent web vulnerabilities in other websites during a visit to a malicious web page. This lets an adversary leverage the computing and network resources of visitors and send malicious requests from a large variety of trustworthy IP addresses originating from residential networks. Finally, we find that currently deployed security measures are inadequate to thwart the realistic threat of cross-origin vulnerability detection.