Securityheaders

Securityheaders adds common security-related HTTP headers to responses with a single declaration, instead of hand-rolling output filter rules.

What it adds

By default, to every response that does not already set them:

• X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff — forbids the browser from MIME-sniffing, so it honours the declared Content-Type instead of guessing. Prevents a file served as, say, text/plain from being run as HTML or JavaScript.
• X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN — only the same origin may embed the page in a frame, mitigating clickjacking. (The modern equivalent is the CSP frame-ancestors directive; keeping both is common.)
• Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin — limits how much of the URL is sent in the Referer header to other origins.

Two further headers are opt-in (added only when you configure them):

• Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) — tells the browser to use HTTPS only for this domain. Use with care: it is honoured only over HTTPS, it is sticky (the browser remembers it for the whole max-age), and includeSubDomains forces every subdomain of the registrable domain to HTTPS for that duration — which can take sibling subdomains offline if they are not all on HTTPS. Enable it only when the whole domain is HTTPS-only.
• Content-Security-Policy (CSP) — restricts where scripts, styles, etc. may come from. Very effective against XSS, but application-specific: there is no safe generic default, and a wrong policy breaks the site. Set one tailored to your application.

Any header already set by the application is left untouched, so you can override a default per response.

Ordering

This is a response filter: it decorates responses produced by earlier extensions. Place it after the extension whose responses it should cover (Staticmod, Eliom, ...). If placed before, it sees no response and silently adds nothing.

Using as a library

Load OCamlfind package ocsigenserver.ext.securityheaders from your Dune file, and see the API documentation:

let _ =
   Ocsigen.Server.start
     [ Ocsigen.Server.host
         [ Staticmod.run ~dir:"static" ()
         ; Securityheaders.run () ]]

Configuration file

Load the extension and add the <securityheaders/> element to a host, after the elements producing the responses to decorate:

<extension findlib-package="ocsigenserver.ext.securityheaders"/>
...
<host hostfilter="*">
  <static dir="/path/to/the/local/directory" />
  <securityheaders/>
</host>

Each header can be customised or disabled with an attribute. The values "no", "none" and the empty string disable a header. HSTS and CSP are added only when their attribute is present:

<securityheaders
   frame-options="DENY"
   referrer-policy="no-referrer"
   nosniff="true"
   hsts="max-age=63072000; includeSubDomains"
   content-security-policy="default-src 'self'" />