JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a language and platform independent format for data interchange. JSON is in widespread use with a number of JSON parsers and libraries available for different languages. While some information is available for JSON hijacking this attack is not very well understood.
JSON Hijacking as the name suggests is an attack similar to Cross-Site Request Forgery where an attacker can access cross-domain sensitive JSON data from applications that return sensitive data as array literals to GET requests. An example of a JSON call returning an array literal is shown below:
[{"id":"1001","ccnum":"4111111111111111","balance":"2345.15"},{"id":"1002","ccnum":"5555555555554444","balance":"10345.00"},{"id":"1003","ccnum":"5105105105105100","balance":"6250.50"}]
This attack can be achieved in 3 major steps:
- Step 1: Get an authenticated user to visit a malicious page.
- Step 2: The malicious page will try and access sensitive data from the application that the user is logged into. This can be done by embedding a script tag in an HTML page since the same-origin policy does not apply to script tags.
