Clickjacking: Attacks and Defenses Lin-Shung Huang Alex Moshchuk Helen J. Wang Carnegie Mellon University Microsoft Research Microsoft Research
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Stuart Schechter Collin Jackson Microsoft Research Carnegie Mellon University
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract such as a “claim your free iPad” button. Hence, when Clickjacking attacks are an emerging threat on the web. the user “claims” a free iPad, a story appears in the user’s In this paper, we design new clickjacking attack variants Facebook friends’ news feed stating that she “likes” the using existing techniques and demonstrate that existing attacker web site. For ease of exposition, our description clickjacking defenses are insufficient. Our attacks show will be in the context of web browsers. Nevertheless, the that clickjacking can cause severe damages, including concepts and techniques described are generally applica- compromising a user’s private webcam, email or other ble to all client operating systems where display is shared private data, and web surfing anonymity. by mutually distrusting principals. We observe the root cause of clickjacking is that an Several clickjacking defenses have been proposed and attacker application presents a sensitive UI element of a deployed for web browsers, but all have shortcomings. target application out of context to a user (such as hiding Today’s most widely deployed defenses rely on frame- the sensitive UI by making it transparent), and hence the busting [21, 37], which disallows a sensitive page from user is tricked to act out of context. To address this root being framed (i.e., embedded within another web page).