XXE Attacking Guide

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Many different client technologies such as web, mobile, cloud and more – send messages to business applications using XML. In order for the application to work with these self-descriptive XML messages, it has to parse them and check that the format is correct.

This article will describe XML External Entity (XXE) injection attack and its basics in order to provide you with a better understanding of the attack and how to deal with it.

Since we will be talking about XXE injection, first we should understand the meaning of external entities and what they allow us to achieve.

External entities refer to data that an XML processor has to parse. They are useful for creating a common reference that can be shared between multiple documents. Any changes that are made to external entities are automatically updated in the documents which contain references to them. Meaning, XML uses external entities to fetch information or “content” – into the body of the XML document.

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Password Autocomplete vulnerability and a workaround solution

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Until recently, it was trivial for developers to disable the “save you password” feature implemented by all major browsers. However, in the last years, browser vendors have begun to actively discourage and prevent applications from disabling this feature. Their case is that the safest practice for users is to use a password manager, instead of having their passwords lying around on digital or physical support, where they can be exposed or stolen. Since it’s a client-side issue, they claim that the option should be given to users (and not to the developers) to disable this feature by configuring the browser itself.

Although this may be partly true, it does not take into account highly sensitive applications, which might be used on a shared computer, and which do not want to rely on the browser being properly configured (with autocomplete disabled). If this is your case, you should keep on reading.

It is now a real challenge to find a workaround that will work across all major browsers. So we came up with the following trick which detects the user’s browser version and acts accordingly:

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