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arXiv · 1911.12332

XSS Vulnerabilities in Cloud-Application Add-Ons

Thanh Bui·Siddharth Rao·Markku Antikainen·Tuomas Aura
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Abstract

Cloud-application add-ons are microservices that extend the functionality of the core applications. Many application vendors have opened their APIs for third-party developers and created marketplaces for add-ons (also add-ins or apps). This is a relatively new phenomenon, and its effects on the application security have not been widely studied. It seems likely that some of the add-ons have lower code quality than the core applications themselves and, thus, may bring in security vulnerabilities. We found that many such add-ons are vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS). The attacker can take advantage of the document-sharing and messaging features of the cloud applications to send malicious input to them. The vulnerable add-ons then execute client-side JavaScript from the carefully crafted malicious input. In a major analysis effort, we systematically studied 300 add-ons for three popular application suites, namely Microsoft Office Online, G Suite and Shopify, and discovered a significant percentage of vulnerable add-ons in each marketplace. We present the results of this study, as well as analyze the add-on architectures to understand how the XSS vulnerabilities can be exploited and how the threat can be mitigated.

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Thanh Bui, Siddharth Rao, Markku Antikainen, Tuomas Aura. 2019-11-27. XSS Vulnerabilities in Cloud-Application Add-Ons. https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.12332

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