DOM-based XSS

In DOM-based XSS the malicious code is never sent to the server. The injection-point is somewhere where javascript has access.

The typical example of how this works is with URLs.

The user is able to control the URL with the help of the hash-symbol #. If we add that symbol to a URL the browser will not include that characters that comes after it in the requet to the server.

https://example.com/#this_is_not_sent_to_server

However, the complete URL is included in DOM-objects.

document.URL
# will generate this output: https://example.com/#this_is_not_sent_to_server

Source

So in order to inject and execute a DOM-based XSS we need a injection-point (called source) and a point of execution (called sink).

In the example above document.URL is our source. Example of other sources are:

    document.URL
    document.documentURI
    document.URLUnencoded (IE 5.5 or later Only)
    document.baseURI
    location
    location.href
    location.search
    location.hash
    location.pathname

    window.name
    document.referrer

Sinks

eval    
setTimeout      
setInterval     
setImmediate    
execScript      
crypto.generateCRMFRequest      
ScriptElement.src       
ScriptElement.text      
ScriptElement.textContent       
ScriptElement.innerText         
anyTag.onEventName

References

https://github.com/wisec/domxsswiki/wiki/location,-documentURI-and-URL-sources