DeleteUnmasksGlobals

(legacy summary: delete defeats masking of globals via with) (legacy labels: Attack-Vector)

Delete can unmask globals

Effect

If a rewriter implementation relies on with blocks to mask global references, such as by iterating all global references, and then creating an object with a property for each, and defining all untrusted code inside a with statement, the untrusted code can escape containment using delete.

Background

The with construct takes an expression, and any reference R in its body not satisfied by an interior declaration is interpreted as obj[R] if (R in obj).

Assumptions

• Globals are hidden by using the with construct; and
• Either deletes of unqualified references are not prevented, or the masking object is aliased by this or some other reference that can have properties deleted from it.

Versions

All

Example

If the untrusted code

  delete document;
  alert('your cookie is ' + document.cookie);

is naively implemented as

  with ({ document: null }) {
    delete document;
    alert('your cookie is ' + document.cookie);
  }