A researcher has earned $5,000 from Google for an interesting cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability found in the dynamic email feature added a few months ago to Gmail.
The dynamic email feature, also known as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for email or AMP4Email, enables the use of dynamic HTML content in emails, allowing users to conduct various tasks directly from within an email, such as responding to a Google Docs comment, filling out questionnaires, responding to an event invitation, and browsing a catalog. Google made the feature generally available in July.
Michał Bentkowski, chief security researcher at Securitum, analyzed AMP4Email and discovered that it can be abused for XSS attacks. While AMP4Email does include protections against these types of attacks, the researcher found a way to bypass them using a legacy feature called DOM Clobbering.
DOM Clobbering is a legacy feature in web browsers that has been known to allow XSS attacks. By using DOM Clobbering, the researcher showed how an attacker may be able to add malicious code to an email via AMP4Email and it would get executed on the victim’s side when they opened the message.
However, exploitation of the vulnerability as demonstrated by Bentkowski did not pose a serious risk as he was not able to bypass the content security policy (CSP) in AMP, which is designed to prevent XSS attacks. Furthermore, the expert told SecurityWeek that the attacker’s malicious code would get executed in a sandbox AMP domain rather than the Gmail domain.
Nevertheless, Google described the vulnerability as “awesome” and awarded the researcher a $5,000 bug bounty for his findings, which is the standard amount for XSS flaws.
“Google were still worried about this case because they didn’t want opening emails to execute arbitrary JavaScript (this could be used to send browser exploits),” Bentkowski told SecurityWeek.
The vulnerability was reported to Google on August 15 and it was patched sometime before October 12.
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