Web Application Potentially Vulnerable to Clickjacking

medium Nessus Plugin ID 85582

Synopsis

The remote web server may fail to mitigate a class of web application vulnerabilities.

Description

The remote web server does not set an X-Frame-Options response header or a Content-Security-Policy 'frame-ancestors' response header in all content responses. This could potentially expose the site to a clickjacking or UI redress attack, in which an attacker can trick a user into clicking an area of the vulnerable page that is different than what the user perceives the page to be. This can result in a user performing fraudulent or malicious transactions.

X-Frame-Options has been proposed by Microsoft as a way to mitigate clickjacking attacks and is currently supported by all major browser vendors.

Content-Security-Policy (CSP) has been proposed by the W3C Web Application Security Working Group, with increasing support among all major browser vendors, as a way to mitigate clickjacking and other attacks. The 'frame-ancestors' policy directive restricts which sources can embed the protected resource.

Note that while the X-Frame-Options and Content-Security-Policy response headers are not the only mitigations for clickjacking, they are currently the most reliable methods that can be detected through automation. Therefore, this plugin may produce false positives if other mitigation strategies (e.g., frame-busting JavaScript) are deployed or if the page does not perform any security-sensitive transactions.

Solution

Return the X-Frame-Options or Content-Security-Policy (with the 'frame-ancestors' directive) HTTP header with the page's response.
This prevents the page's content from being rendered by another site when using the frame or iframe HTML tags.

See Also

http://www.nessus.org/u?399b1f56

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Clickjacking_Defense_Cheat_Sheet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickjacking

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 85582

File Name: http_generic_clickjacking.nasl

Version: Revision: 1.7

Type: remote

Family: Web Servers

Published: 8/22/2015

Updated: 5/16/2017

Supported Sensors: Nessus

Risk Information

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 4.3

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:N

Vulnerability Information

Excluded KB Items: Settings/disable_cgi_scanning

Reference Information

CWE: 693