Kali Linux Web Penetration Testing Cookbook - Second Edition

How it works...

Apart from a proper input validation and not using user inputs as output information, sanitization and encoding are key aspects in preventing XSS.

Sanitization means removing the characters that are not allowed from the string; this is useful when no special characters should exist in input strings.

Encoding converts special characters to their HTML code representations, for example, "&" to "&amp;" or "<" to "&lt;". Some applications allow the use of special characters in input strings; for them, sanitization is not an option, so they should encode the inputs before inserting them into the page and storing them in the database.