10 Feb
2023
8
min read

Learning XSS with ChatGPT

ChatGPT is all the rage at the moment, with people claiming everything from "It can make a beginner look like a pro" to "I'm out of a job." so I thought I'd take a little time to explore just how capable this new tool really is. How well can ChatGPT really perform at the job of a pentester? Let's find out.

If I wanted to manually test for cross-site-scripting, what might I do?

Let’s give that a shot…

Step 1) In the above XSS challenge, “Enter your name” is an input field

Step 2) Let’s try entering the malicious script provided

Step 3) It looks like we have execution. SUCCESS

Step 4) Now let’s try some other challenges…

There are no input fields at http://rig.cytix.io/challenges/xss-2.php?animal=bird so how else might I be able to manually test this for XSS?

Let's apply that logic

Step 1) It looks like clicking the animal name changes the query parameter from bird to cat…

Step 2) Let’s give that URL a go…

It didn’t execute… Let's try something else

http://rig.cytix.io/challenges/xss-2.php?animal=<script>alert("XSS")</script> didn't work, what else can I use instead?

Going through them one-by-one...

#3 is a winner!

Time for something a little harder?

how might I exploit XSS at this url http://rig.cytix.io/challenges/xss-3.php#Andy

No luck…

This didn't work in my browser, what else should I try?

In at #2...

We have a winner 🥳

Ok, so we’ve got some pretty successful payloads under our belt. Now to actually make it do something interesting…

Make the svg payload do something more interesting


For the POC to work, I just need to switch out “yourserver.com” for localhost…

Looking at our listener...

It looks like we’ve stolen ourselves a cookie!
bug report

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Ok so that’s great… but any decent security tester needs to know how to do more than just exploit.

How should I prevent attacks like these?

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