CVE-2011-1810 in Chrome
Summary
by MITRE
The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) implementation in Google Chrome before 12.0.742.91 does not properly restrict access to the visit history, which allows remote attackers to obtain sensitive information via unspecified vectors.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 11/08/2021
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2011-1810 represents a critical security flaw in Google Chrome's CSS implementation that existed prior to version 12.0.742.91. This issue falls under the category of information disclosure vulnerabilities where the browser's handling of CSS properties inadvertently exposed sensitive user data. The flaw specifically relates to how Chrome's rendering engine processed certain CSS elements that could potentially leak information about a user's browsing history through unauthorized access mechanisms.
The technical root cause of this vulnerability stems from insufficient validation and access control within Chrome's CSS parser and rendering components. When processing specific CSS properties or selectors, the browser failed to properly enforce security boundaries that should have prevented unauthorized access to history data. This weakness allowed malicious web pages to exploit CSS features that could be manipulated to infer information about previously visited websites, effectively creating a covert channel for history enumeration. The vulnerability operates through unspecified vectors that likely involve CSS pseudo-classes, property interactions, or rendering behaviors that could be abused to extract browsing patterns.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends beyond simple information disclosure, as it represents a significant privacy breach that could enable attackers to reconstruct user browsing patterns and potentially identify sensitive online activities. Attackers could leverage this flaw to determine which websites a user had visited, potentially uncovering personal information, professional activities, or sensitive online behaviors. This capability undermines the fundamental privacy expectations users have when browsing the web and could be particularly damaging in contexts where browsing history reveals confidential information or personal preferences. The vulnerability's exploitation could occur through malicious websites that craft specific CSS code to probe and extract history data, making it particularly dangerous in phishing attacks or targeted surveillance scenarios.
Organizations and users should prioritize immediate remediation by updating to Chrome version 12.0.742.91 or later, which contains the necessary patches to address this access control weakness. Security teams should implement network monitoring to detect potential exploitation attempts and consider browser hardening measures that restrict CSS capabilities in sensitive environments. The vulnerability aligns with CWE-200, which addresses improper exposure of sensitive information, and could be categorized under ATT&CK technique T1566 for credential access through social engineering or information gathering. Additional mitigations include implementing content security policies that restrict CSS loading from untrusted sources and conducting regular security assessments to identify similar access control flaws in web browsers and applications.