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by dgalling 5051 days ago
No, the 3D view can help you spot when someone has already injected content into your page.

But not really, because most of the time, the "content" injected into your page is a script tag, which doesn't show up in the 3D view.
2 comments
dwg 5051 days ago
You're correct that the script tag will not show. However, we train our testers to use special characters, including < and >, in their test data. It happens that the environment in which we spotted the vulnerability was our QA environment.
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dgalling 5051 days ago
The 3D view definitely makes it a bit more visible, but as someone who has spent a considerable amount of time testing XSS filters, it's not all that useful, since you generally know exactly where in the output your input will be, and also because looking at the raw output (not the constructed DOM tree) is a better way to identify XSS vulns.

It's a cool observation nonetheless, and props for catching XSS vulns in your QA environment, not production ;)

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freditup 5051 days ago
Agreed. The 3D view is definitely a cool thing no doubt, but I'm not really seeing it as much use for preventing XSS vulnerabilities. That being said, I think the author of the post recognized this and was just sharing that it could rarely help.
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dwg 5051 days ago
Agreed. It's good to be aware of it as a developer.

In our case it was lucky that we happened to view a page with a vulnerability, and there happened to be data that would be interpreted as an HTML tag. However, I believe in probability. Nothing is certain and so we try to put in place practices that will increase the probability of finding errors, etc.

The 3D view is just another little wrench in our toolbelt that increases our odds.

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