Off-Path Attacking the Web

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. The attacks are practical and require a puppet (malicious script in browser sandbox) running on a victim client machine, and an attacker capable of IP-spoofing on the Internet.

Our attacks are based on a technique that allows an offpath attacker to efficiently learn the sequence numbers of both the client and server in a TCP connection. This technique exploits the fact that many computers, in particular those running (any recent version of) 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. We also present practical defenses that can be deployed at the firewall level, either at the client or server end; no changes to existing TCP/IP stacks are required.