Over the past six months or so I’ve been looking at hyperlink spoofing threats as a bit of a part-time project. I’ve primarily been interested in how the design of social networking platforms impacts the ability of their users to make good...

I’ve seen MS10-002 pop up a few times in discussion recently. This is a reference to the legendary issue that David Lindsay and Eduardo Vela Nava discovered, where neutering for a given heuristic actually enabled XSS, assuming attacker control of...

Arcane design decisions can have subtle but important effects on the characteristics of a security mitigation. Consider how client-side XSS filtering might examine a given HTTP response for evidence of a reflected attack. Is it more sensible to examine...

Reduced attack surface in Standards Mode is a good step forward for XSS-Focused Attack Surface Reduction in the browser. But it’s necessary to prevent framing as a prerequisite to enforced Standards Mode. Putting this into practice is pretty...

Have you ever heard someone ask “Do we need to fuzz this?” This question comes up quite a bit in the context of reactive security work. There are basically two traditional answers: Yes. When you’re attempting to find variants...

On the 16th of January, 2000, the following names were suggested and bounced around among a small group of Microsoft security engineers: Unauthorized Site Scripting Unofficial Site Scripting URL Parameter Script Insertion Cross Site Scripting Synthesized...

RSnake and Dan Kaminsky have been talking about session fixation via DNS Rebinding . As you may recall, an attacker can't abuse your Foo.com cookies in a rebinding attack, though they can walk your browser around Foo.com content and control the session...

One of the things I have taken from the IE XSS Filter project is a healthy fear of legacy character sets. If you've followed Chris Weber , Scott Stender , or Yosuke Hasegawa ’s work, you know that even Unicode is... interesting. But at least in the Unicode...

Credit goes to Alex "Kuza55" Kouzemtchenko for identifying a weakness in the XSS Filter OBJECT tag heuristic. The original heuristic failed to properly sanitize OBJECT tags with the DATA attribute set. Alex found that it is possible to use the DATA attribute...

I've posted a two-part FAQ addressing security considerations for apps that host MSHTML. Check it out over at the SRD blog ! The MSHTML Host Security FAQ: Part I of II The MSHTML Host Security FAQ: Part II of II

Chris Weber's Watcher: http://www.lookout.net/2009/03/20/watcher-security-tool-a-free-web-app-security-testing-and-compliance-auditing-tool/ Watcher plugs into the Fidder HTTP proxy and monitors for all sorts of web app vulns, from the common to the...

http://www.microsoft.com/ie What are you waiting for? Go get it!

I've just posted detail up on the SVRD Blog about some improvements and bug fixes to the XSS Filter feature in IE8 RC1 .

Recently I got Martin Johns connected with Helen Wang 's group in Microsoft Research. Check out Martin's excellent talk @MSR, Secure Code Generation for Web Applications . Here are a few other gems I discovered on content.digitalwell.washington.edu...

Giorgio Maone's new ABE project looks pretty cool. Exposing the loose and often unnecessary boundaries between web applications shines a different light on some old problems in web application security. Enforcing greater formalization and limiting...

Björn Engelmann, Joachim Posegga, and LocalRodeo developer Martin Johns have authored an excellent paper on a new Cross-site Scripting detection system called XSSDS . Stay tuned to noxss.org for a new browser extension based on this technology. The XSSDS...

If you haven’t already seen, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is out – go get it ! Now is a good time to thank everyone who helped make the IE8 XSS Filter a reality. This project wouldn’t have been possible without your hard work, support, leadership, guidance...

I've just posted some detail on the Internet Explorer 8 XSS Filter Architecture / Implementation over on the SWI Blog . It would be great to get some feedback and answer any questions you may have -- just drop me a mail using the Email link to the left...

It's great to see some positive reaction to the potential of our XSS Filter. Now we just need to deliver! In this blog post I’ll try to shed some light on our design philosophy. To understand how we have arrived at our current filtering approach...

IE has announced the new XSS Filter feature which will debut in IE8 Beta 2! Stay tuned to my blog in the coming weeks for more details on how the filter works, its history, its limitations, and some lessons learned during the development process.

My team (SWI React) is hiring for a lead position . Details: Job Title: Lead Software Development Engineer Job Category: Software Development Product: Trustworthy Computing Date Posted: 02...

All web browsers expose what have been referred to as XSS “attack vectors” – various techniques that XSS attacks can leverage to achieve script execution. The best and most well regarded list of these behaviors is RSnake’s XSS Cheat Sheet . The existence...

Check out my ActiveX Kill-Bit FAQ which is now being posted to the SVRD blog . There are three parts, the first of which is now live. Parts two and three should be up by the end of the week.

My team now has a blog! http://blogs.technet.com/swi/ I'll be contributing to the team blog in the future. But don't worry -- my personal blog (this one) isn't going away!

The standard IFRAME-based isolation technique for web apps is starting to show its age. We need something better! Microsoft Research has posted a new paper scheduled to appear at SOSP '07 : Protection and Communication Abstractions for Web Browsers...