Tag Archives: attack

Injecting a JavaScript Attack Vector using CSS Custom Properties

Earlier this week I saw this tweet by Sansec float by:

This one’s pretty nice I must say: as the syntax for CSS Custom Properties is overly permissive (see here) you can use Custom Properties to store your JavaScript attack vector in. If you then use window.getComputedStyle to extract the contents of the Custom Property (see here) and combine it with a function constructor and an IIFE, it’s possible to execute it.

Here’s a pen that loads a remote confetti script using the method described:

Let this underline the importance of a Content Security Policy to prevent remote script loading script evaluation.

Update: Blocking this “hack” with a proper CSP

It took me some time to figure out — as I’m no CSP expert — but turns out the unsafe-inline keyword in the CSP’s source list is enough to block the execution of the JS-IN-CSS.

As a reminder, here are the four allowed keywords:

  • 'none', as you might expect, matches nothing.
  • 'self' matches the current origin, but not its subdomains.
  • 'unsafe-inline' allows inline JavaScript and CSS.
  • 'unsafe-eval' allows text-to-JavaScript mechanisms like eval.

I first thought unsafe-inline would be insufficient here as the code does not call eval, but apparently a function constructor is (correctly!) considered equally harmful, and therefore also blocked.

Here’s an updated demo that blocks the script evaluation:

See the Pen
Injecting a JavaScript attack vector using CSS Custom Properties (with CSP) by Bramus (@bramus)
on CodePen.

The CSP used is this one:

<meta
    http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy"
    content="script-src https://cpwebassets.codepen.io https://cdpn.io https://cdn.jsdelivr.net 'unsafe-inline';"
>

It works as follows:

  • https://cpwebassets.codepen.io and https://cdpn.io are there for the CodePen demo to work
  • https://cdn.jsdelivr.net is there to allow legitimate loading of scripts — such as a jQuery you might need — from that CDN.
  • unsafe-inline is the one that prevents the execution of the JS-IN-CSS defined script by blocking the call to the function constructor

That calls for confetti! 🤪

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