A Protection Mechanism against Malicious HTML and JavaScript Code in Vulnerable Web Applications

Abstract

The high-profile attacks of malicious HTML and JavaScript code have seen a dramatic increase in both awareness and exploitation in recent years. Unfortunately, exiting security mechanisms provide no enough protection. We propose a new protection mechanism named PMHJ based on the support of both web applications and web browsers against malicious HTML and JavaScript code in vulnerable web applications. PMHJ prevents the injection attack of HTML elements with a random attribute value and the node-split attack by an attribute with the hash value of the HTML element. PMHJ ensures the content security in web pages by verifying HTML elements, confining the insecure HTML usages which can be exploited by attackers, and disabling the JavaScript APIs which may incur injection vulnerabilities. PMHJ provides a flexible way to rein the high-risk JavaScript APIs with powerful ability according to the principle of least authority. The PMHJ policy is easy to be deployed into real-world web applications. The test results show that PMHJ has little influence on the run time and code size of web pages.