attack-surface.md

Attack Surface Analysis for nolimits4web/swiper

Attack Surface: Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) within Slides

• 1. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) within Slides:

  • Description: Injection of malicious scripts into the content displayed within Swiper slides.
  • How Swiper Contributes: Swiper provides the container and structure for displaying content. It acts as the delivery mechanism for a malicious payload if the content you provide is not sanitized. This is Swiper's most significant direct contribution to a potential vulnerability.
  • Example:
    • A user submits a comment containing <script>alert('XSS')</script> that is displayed within a Swiper slide. Without sanitization, the script executes.
  • Impact:
    • Compromise of user accounts.
    • Data theft (cookies, session tokens).
    • Website defacement.
    • Redirection to malicious sites.
    • Execution of arbitrary code.
  • Risk Severity: Critical
  • Mitigation Strategies:
    • Developer:
      • Strict Input Sanitization: Crucially, use a robust HTML sanitizer (e.g., DOMPurify) to remove dangerous tags/attributes from user-supplied content before displaying it in Swiper slides.
      • Content Security Policy (CSP): Implement a strong CSP to restrict script execution, providing a vital second layer of defense.
      • Output Encoding: Ensure proper encoding of dynamic content within slides.
      • Input Validation: Validate data types rigorously.

Attack Surface: Denial of Service (DoS) - Excessive Slides

• 2. Denial of Service (DoS) - Excessive Slides:

  • Description: An attacker creates an extremely large number of Swiper slides, overwhelming the application.
  • How Swiper Contributes: Swiper's core function is creating and managing slides. Uncontrolled slide creation directly leverages this functionality for a DoS attack.
  • Example:
    • An attacker submits a form with a value of 1,000,000 for the number of slides, potentially crashing the browser.
  • Impact:
    • Website unavailability.
    • Browser freezing/crashing.
    • Server overload.
  • Risk Severity: High
  • Mitigation Strategies:
    • Developer:
      • Limit Number of Slides: Enforce a strict upper limit on the number of slides.
      • Pagination/Lazy Loading: Use Swiper's "virtual slides" feature or implement pagination to load only a subset of slides at a time. This is essential for both performance and security.
      • Server-Side Rate Limiting: Limit the rate of slide creation.
      • Input Validation: Validate any input controlling the number of slides.