Abusing browser address bar for fun and profit - an empirical investigation of add-on cross site scripting attacks

Abstract

Add-on JavaScript originating from users’ inputs to the browser brings new functionalities such as debugging and entertainment, however it also leads to a new type of cross-site scripting attack (defined as add-on XSS by us), which consists of two parts: a snippet of JavaScript in clear text, and a spamming sentence enticing benign users to input the previous JavaScript. In this paper, we focus on the most common add-on XSS, the one caused by browser address bar JavaScript. To measure the severity, we conduct three experiments: (i) analysis on real-world traces from two large social networks, (ii) a user study by means of recruiting Amazon Mechanical Turks [4], and (iii) a Facebook experiment with a fake account. We believe as the first systematic and scientific study, our paper can ring a bell for all the browser vendors and shed a light for future researchers to find an appropriate solution for add-on XSS.