Makl Ndrix

For a new web project, I’ve been looking at Rails 3.1, the latest update of the popular Ruby on Rails web application framework.

Although I just started on it, and haven’t seen all the goodness, one thing that raised my eyebrows is how static content a la CSS and JavaScript is handled, through an asset pipeline.

In a nutshell, since I’m doing the JQuery bit of the site now, wouldn’t it make much more sense to fetch the libraries from CDN’s, cache the remaining recurring libraries in Nginx (or Apache), and leaving the page specific bits in one big <script> tag, instead of pushing all in a bloated application.js page?

Then again, although I think Rails was what the web community needed, I always had my ideas about frameworks.

Thanks,
Michael

The Internet, as it is today, is a mash-up of JavaScript enabled services, often included from external websites. Internet companies offer so-called widgets, which are JavaScript tools that can be used in your own page. Popular examples of this are site analytics (Omniture, Google Analytics, etc) or share-abilities (AddThis, AddToAny, …). It’s by overwriting Javascript libraries on a page, that we can do other things, such as recording keystrokes.

“Overwriting” javascript libraries, or rather “inserting javascript” can be done in several ways. Cross Site Scripting is one of them, but for the sake of this blog post, I will act as a malicious proxy administrator, and overwrite the Google Analytics DNS entry (www.google-analytics.com) and “fake” the ga.js javascript file.

For this, you’d need only 2 files:

• Javascript keylogger
• PHP backend script

This javascript file, found here, holds 3 parts: JQuery, a base64 encoder and the keylogger code itself: Continue reading…