CWE-82: Improper Neutralization of Script in Attributes of IMG Tags in a Web Page
Description
The web application does not neutralize or incorrectly neutralizes scripting elements within attributes of HTML IMG tags, such as the src attribute.
Attackers can embed XSS exploits into the values for IMG attributes (e.g. SRC) that is streamed and then executed in a victim's browser. Note that when the page is loaded into a user's browsers, the exploit will automatically execute.
- Abstraction
- VariantA weakness tied to a specific language, technology or resource.
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Status
- Incomplete
Common consequences
- ConfidentialityIntegrityAvailability
Read Application Data; Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands
Potential mitigations
- ImplementationOutput Encoding
Use and specify an output encoding that can be handled by the downstream component that is reading the output. Common encodings include ISO-8859-1, UTF-7, and UTF-8. When an encoding is not specified, a downstream component may choose a different encoding, either by assuming a default encoding or automatically inferring which encoding is being used, which can be erroneous. When the encodings are inconsistent, the downstream component might treat some character or byte sequences as special, even if they are not special in the original encoding. Attackers might then be able to exploit this...
- ImplementationAttack Surface ReductionEffectiveness: Defense in Depth
To help mitigate XSS attacks against the user's session cookie, set the session cookie to be HttpOnly. In browsers that support the HttpOnly feature (such as more recent versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox), this attribute can prevent the user's session cookie from being accessible to malicious client-side scripts that use document.cookie. This is not a complete solution, since HttpOnly is not supported by all browsers. More importantly, XmlHttpRequest and other powerful browser technologies provide read access to HTTP headers, including the Set-Cookie header in which the HttpOnly flag...
Related weaknesses
Parent weaknesses
CAPEC attack patterns that exploit it
CWE 4.20 links no CAPEC attack pattern to this weakness.