CAPEC Definitions

    CAPEC Definitions / CAPEC-107

    CAPEC-107: Cross Site Tracing

    Cross Site Tracing (XST) enables an adversary to steal the victim's session cookie and possibly other authentication credentials transmitted in the header of the HTTP request when the victim's browser communicates to a destination system's web server.

    Severity:Very High
    Possibility:Medium

    Extended Description

    The adversary uses an XSS attack to have victim's browser sent an HTTP TRACE request to a destination web server, which will proceed to return a response to the victim's web browser that contains the original HTTP request in its body. Since the HTTP header of the original HTTP TRACE request had the victim's session cookie in it, that session cookie can now be picked off the HTTP TRACE response and sent to the adversary's malicious site. XST becomes relevant when direct access to the session cookie via the "document.cookie" object is disabled with the use of httpOnly attribute which ensures that the cookie can be transmitted in HTTP requests but cannot be accessed in other ways. Using SSL does not protect against XST. If the system with which the victim is interacting is susceptible to XSS, an adversary can exploit that weakness directly to get their malicious script to issue an HTTP TRACE request to the destination system's web server.

    Mitigations

    Administrators should disable support for HTTP TRACE at the destination's web server. Vendors should disable TRACE by default.

    Patch web browser against known security origin policy bypass exploits.

    Relationships with other CAPECs

    CAPEC-593: Session Hijacking

    Prerequisites

    HTTP TRACE is enabled on the web server

    The destination system is susceptible to XSS or an adversary can leverage some other weakness to bypass the same origin policy

    Scripting is enabled in the client's browser

    HTTP is used as the communication protocol between the server and the client

    Related Weaknesses

    CWE-693: Protection Mechanism Failure

    CWE-648: Incorrect Use of Privileged APIs