GitHub’s CodeQL is a robust query language originally developed by Semmle that allows you to look for vulnerabilities in the source code. CodeQL is known as a tool to inspect open source repositories, however its usage is not limited just to it. In this article I will delve into approaches on how to use CodeQL for web application audits, specifically to discover client-side vulnerabilities.
The idea of CodeQL is to treat source code as a database which can be queried using SQL-like statements. There are lots of languages supported among which is JavaScript. For JavaScript both server-side and client-side flavours are supported. JS CodeQL understands modern editions such as ES6 as well as frameworks like React (with JSX) and Angular.
CodeQL is not just grep as it supports taint tracking which allows you to test if a given user input (a source) can reach a vulnerable function (a sink). This is especially useful when dealing with DOM-based Cross Site Scripting vulnerabilities. By tainting a user-supplied DOM property such as location.hash one can test if this value actually reaches one of the XSS sinks, e.g. document.innerHTML or document.write().
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