Microsoft .NET: Circumventing XSS request validation

Ha – I’m back!

I guess most of you know how annoying it is to start a Web Pentest and notice that the request validation of Microsoft IIS / .NET is on. I mean the big red error messages “A potentially dangerous request…” or for the .NET programmers, the HttpRequestValidationException. I nearly always found a way around it. There is a really nice post on stackoverflow about which kind of characters will trigger the exception. But for the lazy ones a list of unallowed strings I figured out myself a while ago:

&#
</
<?
<!
<a to <z
<A to <Z

Firstly, you can just not use the < and & character. Just find a place where you are already inside a tag and write something like [code] " onmouseover="alert(123)" alt=" [/code] Second of all, a string that is allowed and I claim to be the first one who found it (I'm sure I was just not able to find someone else who did it before, let me know!): [code] <%# [/code] Yeah, wow, I know. It's not really that impressive and you can't construct a working XSS with it, but you can use it to break the HTML code (at least in Internet Explorer). But nice anyway. Additionally, you can send your XSS payload in any of the HTTP Headers to .NET and it won't be checked. Or if there is a Web Service which does the same as the Web Application, just send a SOAP request with the XSS string (no HttpRequestValidationException there). Of course there are always different encodings that could work. For example you could try HTML (<) and Unicode (\u003c). Enjoy!

One thought on “Microsoft .NET: Circumventing XSS request validation

  1. Pingback: Top Ten Web Hacking Techniques of 2012 | WhiteHat Security Blog

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