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Bug Bounty Essentials: Karthikeyan Nagaraj

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) Misconfiguration: How Attackers Exploit Weak Policies to Steal Data

Leveraging Poor CORS Implementations to Bypass Security and Access Sensitive Information

Karthikeyan Nagaraj
System Weakness
Published in
6 min readOct 2, 2024

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CORS — Cross Origin Resource Sharing image by Karthikeyan Nagaraj

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is a security mechanism that allows servers to specify who can access resources from a different domain. While CORS is essential for enabling secure communication between web applications and external APIs, misconfigurations can expose web applications to serious security risks. An attacker can exploit these misconfigurations to bypass the same-origin policy and steal sensitive data or perform unauthorized actions.

What is CORS?

CORS stands for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, a security feature implemented in modern web browsers. It allows web servers to control which domains are permitted to access resources, such as APIs, from a different origin. Without CORS, the same-origin policy restricts how scripts running on one domain can interact with resources from another domain, preventing malicious websites from accessing sensitive data.

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Published in System Weakness

System Weakness is a publication that specialises in publishing upcoming writers in cybersecurity and ethical hacking space. Our security experts write to make the cyber universe more secure, one vulnerability at a time.

Written by Karthikeyan Nagaraj

Entrepreneur | Writer | Cyber Security Consultant | AI Researcher TopMate - https://topmate.io/cyberw1ng

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