WebApp Sec mailing list archives

Re: whitelisting HTML tags


From: bugtraq () cgisecurity net
Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 10:45:03 -0500 (EST)

I need to tell my development to limit the HTML tags allowed in input to a
subset that can't be used for XSS.

Any guidelines for this? Obviously <SCRIPT> and <IMG> are out.. but I want a
whitelist of "safe" tags, not a blacklist of "bad" ones. Also, attributes. A
list of attributes for each element that CANNOT introduce script code or
references to background images, etc.

Even if you whitelist certain tags, script execution may still be possible in tag attributes.

Example:

<IMG SRC="javascript:alert(document.cookie);">

Other Examples: http://ha.ckers.org/xss.html


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