The web application produces links to untrusted external sites outside of its sphere of control, but it does not properly prevent the external site from modifying security-critical properties of the window.opener object, such as the location property.
When a user clicks a link to an external site ("target"), the target="_blank" attribute causes the target site's contents to be opened in a new window or tab, which runs in the same process as the original page. The window.opener object records information about the original page that offered the link. If an attacker can run script on the target page, then they could read or modify certain properties of the window.opener object, including the location property - even if the original and target site are not the same origin. An attacker can modify the location property to automatically redirect the user to a malicious site, e.g. as part of a phishing attack. Since this redirect happens in the original window/tab - which is not necessarily visible, since the browser is focusing the display on the new target page - the user might not notice any suspicious redirection.
Threat Mapped score: 0.0
Industry: Finiancial
Threat priority: Unclassified
CVE: CVE-2022-4927
Library software does not use rel: "noopener noreferrer" setting, allowing tabnabbing attacks to redirect to a malicious page
N/A
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| Phase | Note |
|---|---|
| Architecture and Design | This weakness is introduced during the design of an application when the architect does not specify that a linked external document should not be able to alter the location of the calling page. |
| Implementation | This weakness is introduced during the coding of an application when the developer does not include the noopener and/or noreferrer value for the rel attribute. |
Intro: In this example, the application opens a link in a named window/tab without taking precautions to prevent the called page from tampering with the calling page's location in the browser.
Body: There are two ways that this weakness is commonly seen. The first is when the application generates an <a> tag is with target="_blank" to point to a target site:
<a href="http://attacker-site.example.com/useful-page.html" target="_blank">