VariantIncomplete

CWE-1022Use of Web Link to Untrusted Target with window.opener Access

Category: other

Description

The web application produces links to untrusted external sites outside of its sphere of control, but it does not properly prevent the external site from modifying security-critical properties of the window.opener object, such as the location property. When a user clicks a link to an external site ("target"), the target="_blank" attribute causes the target site's contents to be opened in a new window or tab, which runs in the same process as the original page. The window.opener object records information about the original page that offered the link. If an attacker can run script on the target page, then they could read or modify certain properties of the window.opener object, including the location property - even if the original and target site are not the same origin. An attacker can modify the location property to automatically redirect the user to a malicious site, e.g. as part of a phishing attack. Since this redirect happens in the original window/tab - which is not necessarily visible, since the browser is focusing the display on the new target page - the user might not notice any suspicious redirection.

Common consequences· 1

  • Confidentiality — Alter Execution Logic
    The user may be redirected to an untrusted page that contains undesired content or malicious script code.

Potential mitigations· 3

  • [Architecture and Design]Specify in the design that any linked external document must not be granted access to the location object of the calling page.
  • [Implementation]
  • [Implementation]

References

  1. https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/1022.html

Related by meaning· 6

Nearest entities by semantic similarity across the cs-graph corpus.

CWE
URL Redirection to Untrusted Site ('Open Redirect')
CWE
Direct Request ('Forced Browsing')
CWE
Improper Neutralization of Encoded URI Schemes in a Web Page
CVE
CVE-2026-28301
CWE
Inclusion of Web Functionality from an Untrusted Source
CWE
Permissive Cross-domain Security Policy with Untrusted Domains
Sourced from MITRE CWE 4.20. Curated for EU compliance use cases by Adam Lundqvist, Founder at SQUR.