Whitepaper "SESSION RIDING - A Widespread Vulnerability in Today's Web Applications"

["Thomas Schreiber" <ts () securenet de>]

Hello,

I would like to point you to a whitepaper just released:

SESSION RIDING - A Widespread Vulnerability in Today's Web Applications
http://www.securenet.de/papers/Session_Riding.pdf

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Abstract:

In this paper we describe an issue that was raised in 2001 under the name of Cross-Site Request Forgeries (CSRF). It 
seems, though, that it has been neglected by the community, as it is not part of recent Web Application Security 
discussions, nor is it mentioned in OWASP's Top Ten or the like. After having frequently observed this vulnerability in 
our Web Application Security assessments of custom Web applications, we started to examine various public Web 
applications and other browser-based applications:

—       popular (commercial) Web sites 
—       popular browser-based console applications such as administration tools for databases, servers, etc.
—       browser-based administration clients of hardware devices
—       webmail sites and open source and commercial webmail solutions 

We have found out that this vulnerability is present in many of those sites, services and products, some of which 
perform sensitive tasks. Actually, the list of affected companies contains well-known big players. Our analysis has led 
us to the conclusion that this vulnerability is the most widespread one in today's Web applications right after 
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). Even worse, in some scenarios it has to be considered much more dangerous than XSS.

We feel that a concise description of this issue is necessary, along with a description of scenarios that highlight the 
danger to all browser-based applications that do not provide appropriate countermeasures, be it Intranet, Internet or 
console applications. In this paper, we explain this vulnerability in depth, show that it may be used unnoticed by the 
victim, describe potential threats, and finally give hints on how to make Web applications safe from such attacks.

We prefer to call this issue Session Riding which more figuratively illustrates what is going on.
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Feedback is very welcome - especially regarding our rating/experience as one of the most widespread vulnerabilities 
today. 

Thomas Schreiber
____________________________________________________________
SecureNet GmbH - http://www.securenet.de
+49 89/32133-610
mailto:ts () securenet de