Update: Aah. It’s not that there couldn’t have been any better news :P, but today’s News is that Ma1 has agreed to provide feature to block frames through NoScript from the next version (1.1.7). NoScripts Rocks. 🙂
Oh and Yes! Ma1 Rocks too …;)
I have been pretty busy since the last few weeks (and this trend is likely to continue for the coming weeks). Thus, my posts have been more of “news-flashes”. Apologies for that. I’ve now decided to blog about things/technologies I am working on. (Expect some write-ups on security scanners like w3af and code auditing tools like LAPSE.) However, I couldn’t stop myself from putting forward this debate on IFrames. First, let’s see what are the *evil* things that IFrames can do for… *cough*… you
CASE-I
A couple of days ago, Bank of India site was compromised. It was serving malwares to the visitors. This was done by “drive-by downloads“. The criminals were (invisible) IFRAMES.
CASE-II
I hope most of you are aware how dangerous Javascript can be. Of course, I am referring to XSS attacks. However, the recent research, notably from Jeremiah Grossman, RSnake and Gareth Hayes, showed another shockingly dark side of XSS with CSS (yes, Cascading Style Sheets 🙂 ). The criminals here are IFrames, visited attribute, etc.
CASE-III
Gareth also gave a proof of concept on his blog to perform CSRF using CSS, even when Javascript is disabled. He (very wisely) used CSS to change the LOOK and FEEL of a Submit button to a link. Now, when a *smart* user is surfing the web with javascript disabled, he’d not worry about clicking a link, and may end up clicking on the *link* to submit the form.
CASE-IV
You decide… :).
I have anyways left some other known issues, I think.
Gareth has been preaching the evil nature of IFrames for quite some time now. Yesterday, he made a new entry titled “IFRAMES ARE EVIL” on his blog. He suggested using some attributes/tags to disable/enable iframes etc. Iframes have been on my mind for quite some time. I believe that Content Restriction, once introduced, can solve a number of issues. Till then, I believe, Maone’s NoScript can come to the rescue by proving optional feature to disable iframes. I know, this is definitely not a attractive suggestion, but who knew we’d have to browse with Javascript disabled!
Moreover, I thought it’d be a good opportunity to see what other researchers have to say about it. So, I posted it to the Slackers forum. I am watching keenly. 🙂