AutoDetection & Exploitation of DOM Clobbering Vuln at Scale
Introduces Hulk, the first dynamic analysis tool to automatically detect and generate exploit payloads for complex DOM Clobbering vulnerabilities at web scale.
Summary
The Mechanics of DOM Clobbering
DOM Clobbering is a code-reuse web vulnerability where attackers use HTML markup to override global JavaScript variables and document properties, transforming benign scripts into Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vectors.
Systematizing DOM Clobbering Exploitation
Zhengyu Liu and Jianjia Yu present a four-stage framework modeling DOM Clobbering primitives, including named attribute collisions, collection nesting, and prototype chain manipulation.
Hulk: Automated Dynamic Analysis and Payload Generation
The authors introduce Hulk, an open-source dynamic analysis tool that crawls web applications, identifies vulnerable DOM access patterns, and automatically synthesizes working clobbering payloads.
Securing Modern Web Applications
Preventing DOM Clobbering requires web developers to avoid implicit global lookups, use Object.freeze() on critical configurations, and deploy modern HTML sanitizers (such as DOMPurify).
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