How I cross-site scripted Twitter in 15 minutes, and why you shouldn’t store important data on 37signals’ applications
“Today the Ruby on Rails security team released a patch for a cross-site scripting issue which affected multiple high-profile applications, including Twitter and Basecamp. If you’re concerned about the issue and would like to see the patch, please read the advisory from the Rails security team. In this post, I discuss the overall process of finding the issue, and the reason why I’d suggest that no important information be stored on the 37signals applications (Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire).
After seeing a bug in Unicode handling in an unrelated program a few weeks ago, I suddenly had an idea: “I wonder if there are any web applications which have Unicode handling problems that might be security issues?”
My attention quickly turned to Twitter, the only web application I had open at that moment. A few minutes later, I had JavaScript from a URL query parameter falling through the escaping routines and running in the main body of twitter.com. Bingo! Cross-site scripting, the stuff that Twitter worms are made of. But was this a Twitter-specific issue, or did it affect other sites too?”
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“Today the Ruby on Rails security team released a patch for a cross-site scripting issue which affected multiple high-profile applications, including Twitter and Basecamp. If you’re concerned about the issue and would like to see the patch, please read the advisory from the Rails security team. In this post, I discuss the overall process of finding the issue, and the reason why I’d suggest that no important information be stored on the 37signals applications (Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire).
After seeing a bug in Unicode handling in an unrelated program a few weeks ago, I suddenly had an idea: “I wonder if there are any web applications which have Unicode handling problems that might be security issues?”
My attention quickly turned to Twitter, the only web application I had open at that moment. A few minutes later, I had JavaScript from a URL query parameter falling through the escaping routines and running in the main body of twitter.com. Bingo! Cross-site scripting, the stuff that Twitter worms are made of. But was this a Twitter-specific issue, or did it affect other sites too?”
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