XSS Attempts via E-Mail, (Thu, Jan 23rd)

One of the hardest applications to create securely is webmail. E-mail is a complex standard, and almost all e-mail sent today uses HTML. Displaying complex HTML received in an e-mail within a web application is dangerous and often leads to XSS vulnerabilities. Typical solutions include the use of iframe sandboxes and HTML sanitizers. But still, XSS vulnerabilities sneak into applications even if they try hard to get it right. One of my “favorite” examples of how subtle mistakes can cause vulnerabilities was a recent Protonmail vulnerability [1]. Even if you are not using webmail to read email, you may still be exploited as some native email clients have allowed HTML content to leak credentials or have been subject to other HTML-related problems, often related to including content from third-party websites dynamically.