Collected research

JSON-based XSS exploitation

Adi Cohen · IBM Application Security Insider

Internet Explorer falls back to the URL's file extension when a response's declared content-type is missing from the registry MIME database, and application/json is not listed there. Appending path-info such as /.html to the endpoint returns the same JSON body but makes IE render it as HTML, firing reflected XSS in JSON responses. Tested on IE 6-9 over IIS and Apache.

Record

Researcher

Adi Cohen

Published by

IBM Application Security Insider

Topic

XSS

In the archive

• Collected in the 2011 research round

Tags

• xss
• mime
• content-type
• filter-bypass
• url-parsing
• parser-differential
• owasp-a03-2021
• owasp-a05-2021

This page is the archive's own catalogue record. The research is the work of Adi Cohen, first published at the original source. Preserved copies are kept so the citation survives its host; this one was last captured on 16 August 2026.