Closed Bug 924252 Opened 11 years ago Closed 9 years ago

javascript in <img src="javascript:..."> is executed on the main thread (should be in a worker)

Categories

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect)

24 Branch
x86
Linux
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED INVALID

People

(Reporter: yan, Unassigned, Mentored)

Details

(Keywords: csectype-dos, reporter-external, Whiteboard: [reporter-external])

Attachments

(1 file)

Attached file ffxss.html
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0 (Beta/Release) Build ID: 20130911160237 Steps to reproduce: 1. Insert the following into any HTML page: <img src="javascript:var i; while(true){i++;}"> 2. View the page in Firefox (tested with FF24 on Linux, FF25 on OSX) Equivalently, you can load the attached HTML file into Firefox. Actual results: The page freezes and gives an alert that says: "A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding . . ." Expected results: Nothing should have happened, since Firefox deprecated support for the "javascript:" external protocol in image sources in v2.0, according to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3303886/what-browsers-allow-javascript-to-be-the-source-of-image-tags. Note that <img src="javascript:alert(1);"> simply gives an ReferenceError (alert is not defined). It seems that the javascript can't access browser-defined variables, but this doesn't stop us from doing DOS attacks.
It doesn't appear that this is a security issue in itself, just a DOS. But before I open this up we need to know that running JS via image handlers isn't exploitable in other ways.
Group: core-security
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Flags: needinfo?(bzbarsky)
Group: core-security
Flags: sec-bounty?
Whiteboard: [reporter-external]
<img src="javascript:"> runs the script in a sandbox, not against the page. It has no access to any of the page's objects. Given that this is not the only way to DoS with an arbitrary image URL (e.g. you could use a small data: png that expands to a multi-hundred-gigabyte decompressed image), I'm not sure it's worth worrying about the DoS angle of this overmuch either... What's more interesting is that our current behavior is content-detectable: you can actually output image data that will render. The question is whether the spec will support that or not; if not, we should consider removing this.
Flags: needinfo?(bzbarsky)
What's the point of a javascript: URI that *couldn't* output image data? Isn't that the whole point? If the script runs in a sandbox, could we just run it in a worker? That way it would load asynchronously and we could apply a timeout.
> If the script runs in a sandbox, could we just run it in a worker? Hmm. I believe we could, yes.
Could you use sandboxed JS to create heap memory corruption? In any case, Chrome doesn't have this bug.
> Could you use sandboxed JS to create heap memory corruption? If there are bugs in the JS engine. > In any case, Chrome doesn't have this bug. Chrome's support for javascript: URIs is very restricted. They don't handle them as URIs at all, in fact, which leads to all sorts of spec noncompliance in Chrome.
I'm going to open this up; it's just a DOS, which we don't typically keep hidden. I'm also going to morph the summary to mention moving this evaluation into a worker, since that would solve the DOS.
Group: core-security
Component: Untriaged → DOM
Keywords: csec-dos, sec-low
Product: Firefox → Core
Summary: javascript in <img src="javascript:..."> is executed (XSS, DOS vulnerability) → javascript in <img src="javascript:..."> is executed on the main thread (should be in a worker)
Flags: sec-bounty? → sec-bounty-
Keywords: sec-low
Bobby, would it be viable to create XPConnect sandbox objects on a non-main thread? I assume that we do in fact want to run this in a sandbox, not a full-up Worker, because those expose networking APIs like XHR that we don't want to expose here.
Flags: needinfo?(bobbyholley)
(In reply to Not doing reviews right now from comment #9) > Bobby, would it be viable to create XPConnect sandbox objects on a non-main > thread? > > I assume that we do in fact want to run this in a sandbox, not a full-up > Worker, because those expose networking APIs like XHR that we don't want to > expose here. That would involve security wrappers on workers, which is doable, but not something we'd do lightly. It seems like a quicker path to victory would just be to define a worker context with no interfaces exposed and nothing exposed by the bindings on the global. Then the worker itself is a sandbox. This might be useful for other things too.
Flags: needinfo?(bobbyholley)
Mentor: bzbarsky
I would like to work on this could someone help me where to start of it :)
Flags: needinfo?(bzbarsky)
Given bug 1018583 and its fix, I think this bug is now just invalid. We don't do the sandbox thing at all anymore.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 9 years ago
Flags: needinfo?(bzbarsky)
Resolution: --- → INVALID
Component: DOM → DOM: Core & HTML
You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.

Attachment

General

Creator:
Created:
Updated:
Size: