AppSec Israel 2018

The Last XSS Defense Talk

Why are we still talking about Cross Site Scripting in 2018? Because it's painfully difficult to defend against XSS even to this day. This talk is a fundamental update to the 2011 AppSec USA talk "The Past Present and Future of XSS Defense". We'll address new defensive strategies such as modern JavaScript framework defense in Angular, React and other frameworks. We'll also look at how CSP deployment has changed in the past 7 years illustrating the progressive use of content security which supports CSP v1, v2 and v3 concurrently. We will then look at advances in HTML sanitization on both the client and server and focus on sanitizers and defensive libraries that have stood the test of time in terms of maintenance and security. We'll also look at interesting design topics such as how HTML injection is still critical even in the face of rigorous XSS defense and how HTTPOnly cookies are largely ineffective. This talk should help developers and security professionals alike build a focused and modern strategy to defend against XSS in modern applications.