CodeQL jQuery Example
(This was written and first published elsewhere in June 2020) The example below comes from a May 2020 workshop on using CodeQL. To set up CodeQL, you import code into a database to run queries against using the CodeQL language. The results of queries can be viewed inside Visual Studio Code. More resources here . The snippet below checks for potentially unsafe input to $ in jQuery plugins. In the older version of Bootstrap examined in the workshop, an xss vulnerability existed because the library didn't check whether actual DOM elements were being passed to $ , creating an xss sink. For example, when .text() is called in code like $(options.textSrcSelector).text() , an unsafe string passed to $ could be executed by jQuery. The workshop repo suggests one better way to refactor the code. The from/where/select syntax is a little SQL-y, you import javascript to get the autocomplete goodies in VS Code, use classes and predicates to organize and reuse code. Note that = is equalit...