September 17, 2024 at 12:46PM
CISA and the FBI advised technology manufacturers to review software for cross-site scripting vulnerabilities before shipping and implement secure-by-design practices to eliminate such flaws entirely. They recommended input validation, output encoding functions, code reviews, and adversarial testing to prevent XSS vulnerabilities in future software releases. This warning is part of CISA’s Secure by Design alert series.
Based on the meeting notes, the main takeaways are:
1. CISA and the FBI are urging technology manufacturing companies to review their software and ensure that future releases are free of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities before shipping. This is to prevent exploitation opportunities for threat actors, as XSS vulnerabilities still plague software releases today.
2. Executives of technology manufacturing companies are encouraged to prompt formal reviews of their organizations’ software to implement mitigations and a secure-by-design approach that could eliminate XSS flaws entirely.
3. To prevent XSS vulnerabilities in future software releases, technical leaders are advised to review threat models, ensure software validates input for both structure and meaning, use modern web frameworks with built-in output encoding functions, and conduct detailed code reviews and adversarial testing throughout the development lifecycle.
4. CISA’s “Secure by Design” alert series aims to highlight the prevalence of widely known and documented vulnerabilities that have yet to be eliminated from software products despite available and effective mitigations. Previous alerts have covered vulnerabilities such as path OS command injection, path traversal, SQL injection (SQLi), and default passwords in SOHO routers.
5. MITRE’s top 25 most dangerous software weaknesses between 2021 and 2022 ranked XSS vulnerabilities as the second most dangerous, highlighting the significance of addressing and preventing these vulnerabilities.
These takeaways emphasize the importance of proactive measures to eliminate XSS vulnerabilities in software products and the need for ongoing vigilance and awareness of cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities.