Cyber Risks · PortSwigger Research

CSS:the bomb inside your inbox

Summary: PortSwigger researcher Gareth Heyes found that webmail clients including Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, Fastmail, ProtonMail, Gmail and Outlook render untrusted CSS in a trusted UI, and that sanitizer-versus-browser parsing discrepancies let him spoof UI actions, exfiltrate tokens and steal passwords. He demonstrated a real Outlook bug that opens the UI ribbon and pins a message to the victim's Outlook, which he says Microsoft has not fixed, and showed that pasting clipboard HTML into AOL and Yahoo Mail briefly flashed page text red, indicating a race condition in CSS sanitization.

Why it matters: Heyes showed a 12-character hex token from Medium's email login could be brute-forced through nested CSS attribute selectors and stolen after a victim pasted into a draft, letting an attacker log in as that user - and he says almost any 12-character hex token is exposed the same way.

Read the original at PortSwigger Research ↗

Topics
Vulnerabilities & Patching
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