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Seldaek
This has been demo'd a long time ago already [1], and it seems they haven't done anything yet ? Wtf.

[1] http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/massive-twitter-cross-site-scri...

fname
EDIT: nevermind.. you're right. WTF is right.
b3n
It was fixed, but now it's back again...

> The problem is similar to one described last August by James Slater. That time around the issue was with the application URL, this time it appears the application name is the issue.

[dead] Sejanus
Different field, application name instead of application URL.
agentultra
At least this script in particular seems pretty harmless. I glossed over the "rainbow links" code, so maybe there was something vicious in there.

Either way, XSS sucks. Surprised that they haven't plugged this one yet.

dirtyhand
Twitter is probably still using Rails 2.3, where you have to explicitly tell the framework to html escape every time you're outputting a string.

Rails 3 changes this by always html escaping strings.

texec
Security shouldn't be a matter of the framework, especially if it belongs to well known problems like XSS.
ashearer
With programmers being human, there's a lot to be said for the framework providing a secure default. Even so, it's surprising how often this particular mistake occurs.
marcinw
You seriously think developers will manually HTML encode every time user input is rendered in the response? It's not just HTML they have to worry about, but Javascript, URL, HTML attributes, etc. If the framework doesn't automatically do it, nobody does it. That is, until they get hit by XSS.
InclinedPlane
Of course. But there's no reason not to make security easier and more natural (pit of success vs. struggling uphill).
wingo
Depends on what you mean by "framework". I would interpret that as "the language in which you write your application", and in that case a language that treats text and HTML as different datatypes does provide more security.

Rails' conflation of these types guarantees that whatever the default for escaping, there will be bugs in applications written in/on rails.

hnal943
I think twitter is using Lift, not Rails.
[dead] caffogene
Why can't Twitter get its shit together? When Facebook faces those kind of problems, they iron them out in a blink of an eye. Scaling problems? No problem, I don't think I've ever experienced Facebook going down in the past 4-5 years!

How can a top-10 Alexa site such as Twitter continually entertain users with hours of downtime every week? What about escaping input? This is below web dev 101 for god's sake.

code_duck
Twitter sure does have issues with stuff like this. I noticed a while back that they were double encoding some strings on output, too - I had an ampersand in my location and it was showing as & on the page.
NathanKP
None of the code looks malicious, but I would suggest that if you have a Twitter account and/or are logged into it, don't visit the page because he might be stealing cookies.