There's no perfect way to change the user agent string for the UWP WebView (x-ms-webview in HTML, Windows.UI.Xaml.Controls.WebView in XAML, and Windows.Web.UI.Interop.WebViewControl in Win32) but there are two imperfect methods folks end up using.

The first is to call UrlMkSetSessionOption. This is an old public API that allows you to configure various arcane options including one that is the default user agent string for requests running through urlmon. This API is allowed by the Microsoft Store for UWP apps. The change it applies is process wide which has two potential drawbacks. If you want to be able to have different UA strings set for different requests from a WebView that's not really possible with this solution. The other drawback is if you're using out of process WebView, you need to ensure you're calling into UrlMkSetSessionOption in the WebView's process. You'll need to write third party WinRT that calls UrlMkSetSessionOption, create the out of proc WebView, navigate it to some trusted local page, use AddWebAllowedObject or provide that URI WinRT access, and call into your third party WinRT. You'll need to do that for any new WebView process you create.

The second less generally applicable solution is to use NavigateWithHttpRequestMessage and set the User-Agent HTTP header. In this case you get to control the scope of the user agent string changes but has the limitations that not all sub resource downloads will use this user agent string and for navigations you don't initiate you have to manually intercept and re-request being careful to transfer over all POST body state and HTTP headers correctly. That last part is not actually possible for iframes.

    function PromiseExecutionSerializer() {
        var lastPromise = WinJS.Promise.wrap(); // Start with an empty fulfilled promise.

        this.addPromiseForSerializedExecution = function(promiseFunction) {
            lastPromise = lastPromise.then(function () {
                // Don't call directly so next promise doesn't get previous result parameter.
                return promiseFunction();
            });
        }
    }

Require a caller provided unique MessagePort

This solves the problem but puts a lot of work on the caller who may not notice nor follow this requirement.

Uniquely mark my messages

To ensure I'm acting upon my own messages and not messages that happen to have similar properties as my own, I place a 'type' property on my postMessage data with a value of a URN unique to me and my JS library. Usually because its easy I use a UUID URN. There's no way someone will coincidentally produce this same URN. With this I can be sure I'm not processing someone else's messages. Of course there's no way to modify my postMessage data to prevent another library from accidentally processing my messages as their own. I can only hope they take similar steps as this and see that my messages are not their own.

Use caller provided MessagePort only to upgrade to new unique MessagePort

I can also make my own unique MessagePort for which only my library will have the end points. This does still require the caller to provide an initial message channel over which I can communicate my new unique MessagePort which means I still have the problems above. However it clearly reduces the surface area of the problem since I only need once message to communicate the new MessagePort.

• comp.basalisk FAQ by David Langford written as a FAQ.
• Wikihistory by Desmond Warzel presented as a forum thread.
• The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution by Christopher Cherian written as a scientific report.

Code

    def nextServerCallback(self, data):
        parsed_data = json.loads(data)
        # Chunk was wrong!
        if not parsed_data['success']:
            # Defend against timing attacks
            remaining_time = self.expectedRemainingTime()
            self.log_info('Going to wait %s seconds before responding' %
                          remaining_time)
            reactor.callLater(remaining_time, self.sendResult, False)
            return

        self.checkNext()

Issue

Level 7 of the Stripe CTF involved running a length extension attack on the level 7 server's custom crypto code.

Code

@app.route('/logs/')
@require_authentication
def logs(id): 
    rows = get_logs(id) 
    return render_template('logs.html', logs=rows) 

...

def verify_signature(user_id, sig, raw_params):
    # get secret token for user_id
    try:
        row = g.db.select_one('users', {'id': user_id})
    except db.NotFound:
        raise BadSignature('no such user_id')
    secret = str(row['secret'])

    h = hashlib.sha1()
    h.update(secret + raw_params)
    print 'computed signature', h.hexdigest(), 'for body', repr(raw_params)
    if h.hexdigest() != sig:
        raise BadSignature('signature does not match')
    return True

Issue

The level 7 web app is a web API in which clients submit signed RESTful requests and some actions are restricted to particular clients. The goal is to view the response to one of the restricted actions. The first issue is that there is a logs path to display the previous requests for a user and although the logs path requires the client to be authenticatd, it doesn't restrict the logs you view to be for the user for which you are authenticated. So you can manually change the number in the '/logs/[#]' to '/logs/1' to view the logs for the user ID 1 who can make restricted requests. The level 7 web app can be exploited with replay attacks but you won't find in the logs any of the restricted requests we need to run for our goal. And we can't just modify the requests because they are signed.

However they are signed using their own custom signing code which can be exploited by a length extension attack. All Merkle–Damgård hash algorithms (which includes MD5, and SHA) have the property that if you hash data of the form (secret + data) where data is known and the length but not content of secret is known you can construct the hash for a new message (secret + data + padding + newdata) where newdata is whatever you like and padding is determined using newdata, data, and the length of secret. You can find a sha-padding.py script on VNSecurity blog that will tell you the new hash and padding per the above. With that I produced my new restricted request based on another user's previous request. The original request was the following.

count=10&lat=37.351&user_id=1&long=%2D119.827&waffle=eggo|sig:8dbd9dfa60ef3964b1ee0785a68760af8658048c

count=10&lat=37.351&user_id=1&long=%2D119.827&waffle=eggo%80%02%28&waffle=liege|sig:8dbd9dfa60ef3964b1ee0785a68760af8658048c

Notes

Code review red flags included custom crypto looking code. However I am not a crypto expert and it was difficult for me to find the solution to this level.

Level 4 and level 6 of the Stripe CTF had solutions around XSS.

Level 4

Code

> Registered Users 

<%@registered_users.each do |user| %>
<%last_active = user[:last_active].strftime('%H:%M:%S UTC') %>
<%if @trusts_me.include?(user[:username]) %>

• 
<%= user[:username] %>
(password: <%= user[:password] %>, last active <%= last_active %>)


Issue

The level 4 web application lets you transfer karma to another user and in doing so you are also forced to expose your password to that user. The main user page displays a list of users who have transfered karma to you along with their password. The password is not HTML encoded so we can inject HTML into that user's browser. For instance, we could create an account with the following HTML as the password which will result in XSS with that HTML:

This HTML runs script that uses jQuery to post to the transfer URI resulting in a transfer of karma from the attacked user to the attacker user, and also the attacked user's password.

Notes

Code review red flags in this case included lack of encoding when using user controlled content to create HTML content, storing passwords in plain text in the database, and displaying passwords generally. By design the web app shows users passwords which is a very bad idea.

Level 6

Code

...

    def self.safe_insert(table, key_values)
      key_values.each do |key, value|
        # Just in case people try to exfiltrate
        # level07-password-holder's password
        if value.kind_of?(String) &&
            (value.include?('"') || value.include?("'"))
          raise "Value has unsafe characters"
        end
      end

      conn[table].insert(key_values)
    end

Issue

This web app does a much better job than the level 4 app with HTML injection. They use encoding whenever creating HTML using user controlled data, however they don't use encoding when injecting JSON data into script (see post_data initialization above). This JSON data is the last five most recent messages sent on the app so we get to inject script directly. However, the system also ensures that no strings we write contains single or double quotes so we can't get out of the string in the JSON data directly. As it turns out, HTML lets you jump out of a script block using no matter where you are in script. For instance, in the middle of a value in some JSON data we can jump out of script. But we still want to run script, so we can jump right back in. So the frame so far for the message we're going to post is the following:

Stripe's web security CTF's Level 1 and level 2 of the Stripe CTF had issues with missing input validation solutions described below.

Level 1

Code

          $filename = 'secret-combination.txt';
      extract($_GET);
      if (isset($attempt)) {
        $combination = trim(file_get_contents($filename));
        if ($attempt === $combination) {

Issue

The issue here is the usage of the extract php method which extracts name value pairs from the map input parameter and creates corresponding local variables. However this code uses $_GET which contains a map of name value pairs passed in the query of the URI. The expected behavior is to get an attempt variable out, but since no input validation is done I can provide a filename variable and overwrite the value of $filename. Providing an empty string gives an empty string $combination which I can match with an empty string $attempt. So without knowing the combination I can get past the combination check.

Notes

Code review red flag in this case was the direct use of $_GET with no validation. Instead of using extract the developer could try to extract specifically the attempt variable manually without using extract.

Level 2

Code

    $dest_dir = "uploads/";
    $dest = $dest_dir . basename($_FILES["dispic"]["name"]);
    $src = $_FILES["dispic"]["tmp_name"];
    if (move_uploaded_file($src, $dest)) {
      $_SESSION["dispic_url"] = $dest;
      chmod($dest, 0644);
      echo "
Successfully uploaded your display picture.
";
    }

Issue

This code accepts POST uploads of images but with no validation to ensure it is not an arbitrary file. And even though it uses chmod to ensure the file is not executable, things like PHP don't require a file to be executable in order to run them. Accordingly, one can upload a PHP script, then navigate to that script to run it. My PHP script dumped out the contents of the file we're interested in for this level:

Notes

Code review red flags include manual file management, chmod, and use of file and filename inputs without any kind of validation. If this code controlled the filename and ensured that the extension was one of a set of image extensions, this would solve this issue. Due to browser mime sniffing its additionally a good idea to serve a content-type that starts with "image/" for these uploads to ensure browsers treat these as images and not sniff for script or HTML.

Stripe's web security CTF's level 0 and level 3 had SQL injection solutions described below.

Level 0

Code

app.get('/*', function(req, res) {
  var namespace = req.param('namespace');

  if (namespace) {
    var query = 'SELECT * FROM secrets WHERE key LIKE ? || ".%"';
    db.all(query, namespace, function(err, secrets) {

Issue

There's no input validation on the namespace parameter and it is injected into the SQL query with no encoding applied. This means you can use the '%' character as the namespace which is the wildcard character matching all secrets.

Notes

Code review red flag was using strings to query the database. Additional levels made this harder to exploit by using an API with objects to construct a query rather than strings and by running a query that only returned a single row, only ran a single command, and didn't just dump out the results of the query to the caller.

Level 3

Code

@app.route('/login', methods=['POST'])
def login():
    username = flask.request.form.get('username')
    password = flask.request.form.get('password')

    if not username:
        return "Must provide username\n"

    if not password:
        return "Must provide password\n"

    conn = sqlite3.connect(os.path.join(data_dir, 'users.db'))
    cursor = conn.cursor()

    query = """SELECT id, password_hash, salt FROM users
               WHERE username = '{0}' LIMIT 1""".format(username)
    cursor.execute(query)

    res = cursor.fetchone()
    if not res:
        return "There's no such user {0}!\n".format(username)
    user_id, password_hash, salt = res

    calculated_hash = hashlib.sha256(password + salt)
    if calculated_hash.hexdigest() != password_hash:
        return "That's not the password for {0}!\n".format(username)

Issue

There's little input validation on username before it is used to constrcut a SQL query. There's no encoding applied when constructing the SQL query string which is used to, given a username, produce the hashed password and the associated salt. Accordingly one can make username a part of a SQL query command which ensures the original select returns nothing and provide a new SELECT via a UNION that returns some literal values for the hash and salt. For instance the following in blue is the query template and the red is the username injected SQL code:

SELECT id, password_hash, salt FROM users WHERE username = 'doesntexist' UNION SELECT id, ('5e884898da28047151d0e56f8dc6292773603d0d6aabbdd62a11ef721d1542d8') AS password_hash, ('word') AS salt FROM users WHERE username = 'bob' LIMIT 1

Notes

Code review red flag is again using strings to query the database. Although this level was made more difficult by using an API that returns only a single row and by using the execute method which only runs one command. I was forced to (as a SQL noob) learn the syntax of SELECT in order to figure out UNION and how to return my own literal values.

With Facebook changing its privacy policy and settings so frequently and just generally the huge amount of social sites out there, for many of us it is far too late to ensure our name doesn't show up with unfortunate results in web searches. Information is too easily copyable and archive-able to make removing these results a viable option, so clearly the solution is to create more data.

Create fake profiles on Facebook using your name but with a different photo, different date of birth, and different hometown. Create enough doppelgangers to add noise to the search results for your name. And have them share embarrassing stories on their blogs. The goal is to ensure that the din of your alternates drowns out anything embarrassing showing up for you.

Although it will look suspicious if you're the only name on Google with such chaff. So clearly you must also do this for your friends and family. Really you'll be doing them a favor.

Most existing DRM attempts to only allow the user to access the DRM'ed content with particular applications or with particular credentials so that if the file is shared it won't be useful to others. A better solution is to encode any of the user's horrible secrets into unique versions of the DRM'ed content so that the user won't want to share it. Entangle the users and the content provider's secrets together in one document and accordingly their interests. I call this Blackmail DRM. For an implementation it is important to point out that the user's horrible secret doesn't need to be verified as accurate, but merely verified as believable.

Apparently I need to get these blog posts written faster because only recently I read about Social DRM which is a light weight version of my idea but with a misleading name. Instead of horrible secrets, they say they'll use personal information like the user's name in the DRM'ed content. More of my thoughts stolen and before I even had a chance to think of it first!