Flash Camera and Mic Remember Function and XSS

I spent a lot of time trying to break the Flash settings manager a few years back but one thing that I never mentioned was the way in which Flash’s settings are very often scoped to the domain rather than the app. Although currently allowing Flash access to camera and microphone isn’t all that common, if it ever did become common using XSS would be a pretty interesting tactic. Once access is allowed and remembered, an XSS included object could theoretically end up with the same privileges.

Clearly XSS is bad in of itself, but once settings are permanently remembered, even on a site that has no other sensitive information on it (a free video-game site for instance) something like this could allow an attacker to do some nasty spying. In general applications should never allow access to camera and microphone permanently by default. Thankfully, I don’t think there are a lot of apps out there that request mic and/or camera access so the attack surface may be small. But if that were to change I’m sure if an attacker were creative they could combine CSS history hacking + hidden iframe + XSS + camera and microphone app to spy on quite a number of people who had selected the “Remember” option.

The nice thing about this attack is if it fails it doesn’t create a modal dialog alerting the user to the fact that they were under attack (one of the many perils of not using modal dialogs). So the moral of the story is even if your app contains no sensitive data, you need to be extremely careful of XSS. Oh, yeah and Flash may want to allow the web sites in question to remove the “Remember” function from their apps in future versions.