Instructables.com XSS Vulnerability
Instructables.com suffers from an XSS vulnerability in their search function. This vulnerability was discovered by Luis Santana of the HackTalk Security team.
Pwnt By HackTalk
As can be seen in this image I was able to inject an image into the Instructables.com search result page.
The following url is a PoC showing the vulnerability in a non-destructive way.
http://www.instructables.com/tag/?q=’>”><img src=http://hacktalk.net/pwnt.png />&sort=none
I alerted Instructables to this issue but they never emailed me back after about a month or so and it doesn’t seem that they’ve patched this vulnerability either so I’m posting this in hopes that they’ll patch the hole soon.
Solution
In order to patch this vulnerability simply sanitize the search text with the php function htmlspecialchars(); .
