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Protect Yourself from Magecart Using Subresource Integrity

Magecart has become a big issue in web application security the past few days. They have skimmed credit card information from British Airways and more recently have been injecting into JavaScript assets served by Feedify. Modern websites use many resources to provide the rich experiences customers have come to expect. However, if you don’t directly host or control those resources you are vulnerable to a provider getting attacked and having malicious code injected into the assets you were previously consuming.

We’ve previously written about Subresource Integrity but I’d like to reiterate the benefits and show how to get started securing your assets. Subresource integrity is an official browser feature that allows websites to ensure the integrity of resources loaded from external sources, such as Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). This is a common technique used by websites to speed up the loading of assets, including common JavaScript libraries like jQuery, Google Analytics or Segment.io’s analytics.js.

Since these JavaScript libraries are uncontrolled external code that is being run in the context of your web application, their content must be audited and trusted. Subresource integrity serves to mitigate this issue by ensuring that all loaded resources contain the exact content expected by the website. This is done through the use of a cryptographic digest or hash, computed on all fetched resources, that is then compared against a digest that is served with your page. This provides the browser the capability of detecting resources that have been tampered with, allowing it the opportunity to abort the loading of the resources before any malicious code is executed.

Protecting a resource is as easy as adding the “integrity” attribute to an asset’s HTML tag:

<script src="https://example.com/v1.0.0/include.js"
        integrity="sha256-Rj/9XDU7F6pNSX8yBddiCIIS+XKDTtdq0//No0MH0AE="
        crossorigin="anonymous">
</script>

Since we previously wrote about Subresource Integrity support has grown from browser vendors and all modern desktop browsers support it. We highly recommend this solution but it comes with a caveat – if the external entity changes the JavaScript for a bug fix and doesn’t notify you then your integrity hash won’t match. This is by design but you may want to look for a mechanism to link to a specific version of a library. You may also need to evaluate your risks on a per-page basis. Many of the popular web frameworks provide libraries that make it easy to enable subresource integrity on your assets, and further instructions on making use of the technology are available on the Mozilla Developer Network. The SRI Hash tool provides an easy way to calculate integrity hashes for your assets.

I hope you are inspired to integrate Subresource Integrity into your website. All Tinfoil Security scans flag external resources that are not protected by subresource integrity. Give it a try by signing up for our 30-day free trial.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Tinfoil Security Blog authored by Ben Sedat. Read the original post at: https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/blog/magecart-subresource-integrity