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arXiv · 2012.01946

Can I Take Your Subdomain? Exploring Related-Domain Attacks in the Modern Web

Marco Squarcina·Mauro Tempesta·Lorenzo Veronese·Stefano Calzavara·Matteo Maffei
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Abstract

Related-domain attackers control a sibling domain of their target web application, e.g., as the result of a subdomain takeover. Despite their additional power over traditional web attackers, related-domain attackers received only limited attention by the research community. In this paper we define and quantify for the first time the threats that related-domain attackers pose to web application security. In particular, we first clarify the capabilities that related-domain attackers can acquire through different attack vectors, showing that different instances of the related-domain attacker concept are worth attention. We then study how these capabilities can be abused to compromise web application security by focusing on different angles, including: cookies, CSP, CORS, postMessage and domain relaxation. By building on this framework, we report on a large-scale security measurement on the top 50k domains from the Tranco list that led to the discovery of vulnerabilities in 887 sites, where we quantified the threats posed by related-domain attackers to popular web applications.

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Marco Squarcina, Mauro Tempesta, Lorenzo Veronese, Stefano Calzavara, Matteo Maffei. 2020-12-03. Can I Take Your Subdomain? Exploring Related-Domain Attacks in the Modern Web. https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.01946

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