Prevent Cross-Site Scripting in ASP.NET

This How To shows how you can help protect your ASP.NET applications from cross-site scripting attacks by using proper input validation techniques and by encoding the output. It also describes a number of other protection mechanisms that you can use in addition to these two main countermeasures.

Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks exploit vulnerabilities in Web page validation by injecting client-side script code. Common vulnerabilities that make your Web applications susceptible to cross-site scripting attacks include failing to properly validate input, failing to encode output, and trusting the data retrieved from a shared database.

To protect your application against cross-site scripting attacks, assume that all input is malicious. Constrain and validate all input. Encode all output that could, potentially, include HTML characters. This includes data read from files and databases.