Cyber Risks · PortSwigger Research

Abusing jQuery for CSS powered timing attacks

Summary: PortSwigger researcher Gareth Heyes found that Red Hat's access.redhat.com passed location.hash to the jQuery $ function inside a hashchange event, allowing a timing attack that used jQuery's :has and :contains selectors to infer a logged-in user's full name from the page. Heyes modified Burp's dynamic analysis to scan for jQuery selectors run inside hashchange events, and the vulnerability has since been fixed.

What you should know: The flaw turned what jQuery had already patched into unexploitable XSS back into a way to read a logged-in user's full name, using nothing more than repeated hash changes and measured selector performance.

Read the original at PortSwigger Research ↗

Topics
Vulnerabilities & Patching
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