Security Risks: The Dangers of Clickjacking with Facebook

Clickjacking is a difficult problem.....several researchers speculated on the ramifications for other sites, such as Facebook.

...Authorizing a Facebook application requires only a single click....All of the following actions can be mistakenly performed by a user simply clicking a link or button on an innocent-looking page via clickjacking:
  • Authorize a malicious application. This can happen regardless of any privacy settings. On authorization, an application can immediately access your profile information, your photos, your posted links, your notes, your status updates, etc. It can also send notifications to your profile, send notifications to other people (anonymously or from you), and post feed stories to your wall, all with links included. Note that under default privacy settings, an application can access most of your data if a friend of yours falls prey to this type of attack.
  • Authorize a legitimate application with a cross-site scripting exploit. Most applications vulnerable to such an attack allow for clickjacking installs, where a single click authorizes the application and then forwards a user to an infected application page. That landing page can then execute any of the actions listed above for a malicious application. Note that if a friend falls for this attack and you have authorized the application, all of your data is vulnerable as well.
  • Post a link to your profile. This is possible by applying clickjacking to several Facebook pages used for sharing content. A custom title and description can be set for the link. Other content, such as a Flash video, can also be posted this way.
  • Publish a feed story from a malicious application. Note that this can work regardless of whether you have authorized the application. Applications may publish feed stories prior without authorization by a single click, though this does not grant them access to a user’s data. The feed story may include images, descriptive text, and links. The application can also pre-populate the user’s comments on the story, which would then be submitted upon execution of the clickjacking attack.
  • Send a message to another user. The recipient, subject, and message content, including links, can all be pre-populated. This no longer gives the recipient more access to data than usual, but could still be easily used to spread malware.
  • Send a friend request to another user. This means that a victim could unknowingly send a friend request to a malicious attacker’s profile, and the attacker would simply need to approve the request to gain access to everything on a user’s profile that their friends can access by default.
  • Harvest a user’s post_form_id. Those familiar with Facebook’s code will realize how serious this issue is. However, exploiting a post_form_id also requires knowing a user’s Facebook ID, and so far this attack does not provide the latter.
This list is not simply theoretical – I did some simple testing to make sure that each of these attacks worked. I also would not pretend that my list is exhaustive, and I would welcome any additions from other researchers.

I hope this list will help raise awareness of the potential dangers of clickjacking.
Read the full article from Social Hacking here

See also:

Posted: Wednesday, October 14, 2009


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