XML Attacks Part 4 : Out Of Bound Attacks

In XML Attacks there are situation when an attacker sends the xml payload to the target application, but the web application does not designed to return the response, and the attacker would never no that his/her payload may work or not, this situation is known as Out Of Bound attack.

But there is a way to get the response from the web application in Out Of Bound situation, and this is done by forcing the XML parser make additional request to an attacker controlled server in order to read the extracted data from the web server.

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XML Attacks Part 2 : XXE (Xml eXternal Entity ) Attack

An XXE ( XML eXternal Entity ) attack is a type of attack against an application that parses XML input. This attack occurs when XML input containing a reference to an external entity is processed by a weakly configured XML parser. In this attack particularly the "URI/URL" portion of external entity is used and with this an attacker could do various malicious things, for example extracting sensitive data, Server-Side request forgery and even remote code execution (RCE) in some cases. Now lets see how it works.

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XML Attaks : Part 1 - Basic of XML structure and attack surface

• What is xml?

"Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. "  - - Wikipedia

It is basically used to store and transport data in a structured way. The XML data is also known as self-describing or self-defining, meaning that the structure of the data is embedded within the data itself, which could be easily parsed by a parser and also human readable. The example of XML file is:

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