When communicating online, we constantly use emoticons and put text in bold. Some of us encounter markdown on Telegram or GitHub, while forum-dwellers might be more familiar with BBCode.
All this is made possible by parsers, which find a special string (code/tag/character) in messages and convert it into beautiful text using HTML. And as we know, wherever there is HTML, there can be XSS.
This article reveals our novel technique for finding sanitization issues that could lead to XSS attacks. We show how to fuzz and detect issues in the HTML parsers with nested conditions. This technique allowed us to find a bunch of vulnerabilities in the popular products that no one had noticed before.
The technique was presented at Power Of Community 2021.
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