XSS Risks: Understanding Trends in Web Application Security

Web administrators beware: cross-site scripting vulnerabilities are now far more attractive targets than more notorious bugs such as buffer overflows, according to new figures from Mitre, a U.S. government-funded research organization. Buffer overflows have long been one of the most common types of bugs attacked by malware, with Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) even building in hardware support for an anti-buffer overflow technology called NX (No Execute) or XD (Execution Disable).

But a shift is under way, according to Mitre's findings. While buffer overflows affect executable files written in languages such as C, the increasing popularity of cross-site scripting (XSS) bugs indicates attackers are looking more at programming languages typically used for Web applications, such as Java, .Net and PHP. Client-side scripting languages generally include same-origin policies, which allow interaction between Web objects and pages only as long as they come from the same domain and over the same protocol. XSS bugs allow malicious Web sites to find ways around these policies, potentially accessing sensitive data in other objects or browser windows.

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