Reducing XSS by way of Automatic Context-Aware Escaping in Template Systems

Posted by Jad S. Boutros, Security Team

Building on our earlier posts on defenses against web application flaws ["Automating Web Application Security Testing", "Meet ratproxy, our passive web security assessment tool"], we introduce Automatic Context-Aware Escaping (Auto-Escape for short), a functionality we added to two Google-developed general purpose template systems to better protect against Cross-Site Scripting (XSS).

We developed Auto-Escape specifically for general purpose template systems; that is, template systems that are for the most part unaware of the structure and programming language of the content on which they operate. These template systems typically provide minimal support for…