Unveiling the Invisible: Detection and Evaluation of Prototype Pollution Gadgets with Dynamic Taint Analysis

Prototype-based languages like JavaScript are susceptible to prototype pollution vulnerabilities, enabling an attacker to inject arbitrary properties into an object's prototype. The attacker can subsequently capitalize on the injected properties by executing otherwise benign pieces of code, so-called gadgets, that perform security-sensitive operations. The success of an attack largely depends on the presence of gadgets, leading to high-profile exploits such as privilege escalation and arbitrary code execution (ACE).