Detection of XSS Vulnerabilities in Online Flash

Popular websites such as YouTube, Yahoo! and CNN, contain a large number of Flash files to deliver dynamic contents. However, many Flash objects are exposed to cross-site scripting (abbreviated as XSS, a type of injection problem, in which malicious scripts are injected into the otherwise benign and trusted web sites) vulnerabilities as they are usually coded without properly purifying their inputs. In this paper, we study the technology of XSS in online Flash and introduce an engine called FXD (Flash XSS Detector), which is designed to automatically scramble webpages with embedded Flash objects and check whether or not they are vulnerable to XSS attacks. We evaluate FXD on a large collection of XSS vulnerable Flash testing samples we created, which cover all common Flash XSS vulnerabilities. FXD performs efficiently in detecting Flash XSS by providing wide coverage of different kinds of Flash XSS which is higher than all related works we know. We also use FXD to test real-world websites, and find that there are still many embedded Flash objects vulnerable to XSS even in Alexa Top 100 websites. Finally, we discover a new trend that Flash XSS nowadays is mainly caused by combination of key functions in different categories.