trust - Dave's Blog

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.

Having worked on Windows 8 I'm not in a neutral position to review aspects of it, however I'll say from a high level I love taking the following various positives from smart phone apps and app stores and applying it to the desktop:

• Independent developers can easily publish apps.
• One trusted place for a user to find apps.
• User can trust apps are limited to a declared set of capabilities.
• One common and easy way for users to buy and try apps.
• Easy mechanism for independent developers to collect revenue.

Relieving the independent developer of software development overhead, in this case Windows taking care of distribution and sales infrastructure is wonderful for me with my third party developer hat on. This combined with my new found fun of developing in JavaScript and the new Windows Runtime APIs means I've been implementing and finishing various ideas I've had - some for fun and some for productivity on my Surface. Development notes to follow.

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:

I used FiddlerCore in GeolocMock to edit HTTPS responses and ran into two stumbling blocks that I'll document here. The first is that I didn't check if the Fiddler root cert existed or was installed, which of course is necessary to edit HTTPS traffic. The following is my code where I check for the certs.

    if (!Fiddler.CertMaker.rootCertExists())
    {
        if (!Fiddler.CertMaker.createRootCert())
        {
            throw new Exception("Unable to create cert for FiddlerCore.");
        }
    }

    if (!Fiddler.CertMaker.rootCertIsTrusted())
    {
        if (!Fiddler.CertMaker.trustRootCert())
        {
            throw new Exception("Unable to install FiddlerCore's cert.");
        }
    }

The second problem I had (which would have been solved had I read all the sample code first) was that my changes weren't being applied. In my app I only need the BeforeResponse but in order to modify the response I must also sign up for the BeforeRequest event and mark the bBufferResponse flag on the session before the response comes back. For example:

    Fiddler.FiddlerApplication.BeforeRequest += new SessionStateHandler(FiddlerApplication_BeforeRequest);
    Fiddler.FiddlerApplication.BeforeResponse += new SessionStateHandler(FiddlerApplication_BeforeResponse);
...
    private void FiddlerApplication_BeforeRequest(Session oSession)
    {
        if (IsInterestingSession(oSession))
        {
            oSession.bBufferResponse = true;
        }
    }