Fuzzing for XSS via nested parsers condition

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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WinRAR’s vulnerable trialware: when free software isn’t free

In this article we discuss a vulnerability in the trial version of WinRAR which has significant consequences for the management of third-party software. This vulnerability allows an attacker to intercept and modify requests sent to the user of the application. This can be used to achieve Remote Code Execution (RCE) on a victim’s computer. It has been assigned the CVE ID – CVE-2021-35052.

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