Published 16 years 3 months ago • Last updated April 11, 2025 • ⏱️ 2 min read
My friend mario (he who never blogs) found XSS in facebook a couple of times. This tempted me to look at their sandbox, I didn't register for an account but just tried breaking their FBML console.
They have their own FBML (Facebook markup language) which is just a basic HTML/CSS and a separate Javascript sandbox which restricts what you can execute and access by scoping everything to the app ID. I didn't need to break their Javascript sandbox as breaking the FBML would allow me to execute any code and accessing the document source etc.
I thought the best way to beat the sandbox would be through css expressions as they use the IE7 compat header. I tested their console a couple of times and in 10 minutes found that they fail to parse CSS comments correctly. Next followed incorrect html encoded quotes, so I had the right tools to break out of there but I need to execute Javascript. They allowed stuff like xpression() but I tried double encoding expression in various ways but they seemed to catch it ok. Then I checked their charset which I presumed they use UTF-8 which they do :) I used my old trick of placing a UTF-8 BOM character before the "e" in expression and boom I had a bypass. The first one didn't work because the quote was in the wrong place but I knew a little modification it would work and the final vector is below:-
<div style=background-image:url('http://");xss/**/:expression(alert(1));+"')!important;></div>
Note the ﻾ needed to be the actual character in order to break the sandbox but the vector should execute as is anyway and it was easier to see this way. The !important part isn't required but I just thought I'd assign priority :) The vector has now been fixed by Facebook.