Off-Path Attacking the Web

Abstract

We show how an off-path (spoofing-only) attacker can perform cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF) and site spoofing/defacement attacks, without requiring vulnerabilities in either web-browser or server and circumventing known defenses. Attacker can also launch devastating denial of service (DoS) attacks, even when the connection between the client and the server is secured with SSL/TLS. The attacks are practical and require a puppet (malicious script in browser sandbox) running on a the victim client machine, and attacker capable of IP-spoofing on the Internet. Our attacks use a technique allowing an off-path attacker to learn the sequence numbers of both client and server in a TCP connection. The technique exploits the fact that many computers, in particular those running Windows, use a global IP-ID counter, which provides a side channel allowing efficient exposure of the connection sequence numbers. We present results of experiments evaluating the learning technique and the attacks that exploit it. Finally, we present practical defenses that can be deployed at the firewall level; no changes to existing TCP/IP stacks are required.