Unveiling the Invisible: Detection and Evaluation of Prototype Pollution Gadgets with Dynamic Taint Analysis

Mikhail Shcherbakov, Paul Moosbrugger, Musard Balliu

Keywords: Web application security, prototype pollution vulnerability, dynamic taint analysis

Abstract:

For better or worse, JavaScript is the cornerstone of modern Web. Prototype-based languages like JavaScript are susceptible to prototype pollution vulnerabilities, enabling an attacker to inject arbitrary properties into an object's prototype. The attacker can subsequently capitalize on the injected properties by executing otherwise benign pieces of code, so-called gadgets, that perform security-sensitive operations. The success of an attack largely depends on the presence of gadgets, leading to high-profile exploits such as privilege escalation and arbitrary code execution (ACE).

This paper proposes Dasty, the first semi-automated pipeline to help developers identify gadgets in their applications' software supply chain. Dasty targets server-side Node.js applications and relies on an enhancement of dynamic taint analysis which we implement with the dynamic AST-level instrumentation. Moreover, Dasty provides support for prioritization and visualization of code flows with an IDE, thus facilitating the subsequent manual analysis for building proof-of-concept exploits. To illustrate the danger of gadgets, we use Dasty in a study of the most dependent-upon NPM packages to analyze the presence of gadgets leading to ACE. Dasty identifies 1,269 server-side packages, of which 631 have code flows that may reach dangerous sinks. We manually prioritize and verify the candidate flows to build proof-of-concept exploits for 49 NPM packages, including popular packages such as ejs, nodemailer and workerpool. To investigate how Dasty integrates with existing tools to find end-to-end exploits, we conduct an in-depth analysis of a popular data visualization dashboard to find one high-severity CVE-2023-XXXXX leading to remote code execution. For the first time, our results systematically demonstrate the dangers of server-side gadgets and call for further research to solve the problem.

Track: Security

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Submission Number: 1579