In a reflected cross-site scripting attack, the malicious payload is part of the victims request to the website. The website includes this payload in response back to the user. To summarise, an attacker needs to trick a victim into clicking a URL to execute their malicious payload.
With DOM-Based xss, an attackers payload will only be executed when the vulnerable Javascript code is either loaded or interacted with. It goes through a Javascript function like so:
There are many ways to prevent XSS, here are the 3 ways to keep cross-site scripting our of your application.
1. Escaping - Escape all user input. This means any data your application has received is secure before rendering it for your end users. By escaping user input, key characters in the data received but the web page will be prevented from being interpreter in any malicious way. For example, you could disallow the <and> characters from being rendered.
2. Validating Input - This is the process of ensuring your application is rendering the correct data and preventing malicious data from doing harm to your site, database and users. Input validation is disallowing certain characters from being submit in the first place.
3. Sanitising - Lastly, sanitizing data is a strong defence but should not be used to battle XSS attacks alone. Sanitizing user input is especially helpful on sites that allow HTML markup, changing the unacceptable user input into an acceptable format. For example you could sanitise the <characterintotheHTMLentity<